


This Man Who's Loved You (Your Whole Life)

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Armistice [2]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Betrayal, Child Death, Drug Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Limbo, M/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rescue, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-05-10 07:40:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14732765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: The problem is, that last fight?It might have been their worst yet.**Companion to Trust All The Years (You'll Wait To Find)**





	1. the man in the linen suit

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all,
> 
> So this is a companion piece to Trust All The Years (You'll Wait To Find). I highly suggest you read that first, not because this won't make sense, but because you'll probably enjoy it more in that order.
> 
> It is, surprisingly, a LINEAR STORY, GUYS. That's right. I am writing a linear story. Start to finish. A beginning, a middle and an end. I'm practicing for a story later in this series which will take all of my very best efforts to be linear.
> 
> Anyway, I'd love to hear from you. I hope you like this. Let me know? The title comes from the Patrick Wolf song Armistice.
> 
> My love, of course, always,
> 
> LRCx

**.**

**.**

Murcia is crawling with tourists.

It isn’t even close to Easter anymore and the real tide of summer is still a healthy handful of weeks out. Arthur drags his case behind him over the cobbles, clack-tripping loud at his heels.

The sun is brilliant, the sky cloudless. The air smells of sugar and oranges.

He’s almost late.

He feels naked, dressed in a thin grey t-shirt and navy slacks, already sweating at the collar.

A swarm of teenagers taking up the width of the street jumble past, their abrasive whooping laughter carrying behind them. Arthur swerves to avoid them, cursing when a wheel catches on a stone, upturning his case.

A delayed flight and haughty passport control officer have left little in the way of an even temper for him to maintain. He doesn’t even have it in him to apologise when he knocks into a young woman carrying four hefty grocery bags.

He’s fairly certain the spitting Spanish that follows is meant for him.

Lucky for Arthur, however, Spanish has always been one of his weakest languages, and her insults soar as high over his head as the larks dotting the sun-gilded sky.

It’s the same bistro as last time. Arthur’s feet take him there faithfully, allowing his brooding thoughts to wallow indulgently in the misery of his salt-slick fortune. His phone vibrates from inside his pocket, probably a harassing demand as to his whereabouts. He speeds up, feet sliding sweaty in his loafers.

The corner is in sight, beyond a death trap of a pelican crossing that he half-sprints over, waving fake apologies at the car that jolts to a stop a bare metre away from him, horn screeching furiously.

He slows once the bar is in sight, sweat beading at his hairline. The huge windows of the premises, which make up most of the street facing wall, have been folded out, to let the air inside.

The tables are almost entirely full, and he is quickly summoned to a place close to the bar in the blessed shadows by an older gentleman wearing a white linen suit.

“Mr Bentley,” the man greets jovially once Arthur is within handshaking range.

He takes Arthur’s hand in both of his own, waving over a waitress who gives the old gentleman a winning, if slightly pained smile.

“Valeria, dear, we’ll have a fresh jug of ice water. Mr Bentley, what’s your poison?”

“A martini, thanks,” Arthur says to the woman, whose eyes flit only briefly to his face in acknowledgement.

“A martini, dear, and I’ll have another glass of champagne.”

The client, Calvin Ross, speaks in the same crisp Hertfordshire voice as always.

If this young Valeria is irritated by the English expat, it doesn’t show in her face. She nods as she leaves, and Calvin Ross puts a viciously heavy hand on Arthur’s shoulder in greeting as they sit together.

“Arthur, dear boy, how are you? You’re looking a lot less corporate than last time I saw you, thank Christ.”

Arthur returns his smile with indulgence, wiping the damp line of his eyebrow with a finger and thumb and looking down at his attire ruefully.

“I thought my usual three piece would be a little conspicuous in this weather,” he replies, and Calvin laughs.

“Very good,” the man chortles. “I am glad you could make it. I’d have thought Olivier would be with you?”

Arthur glances around the chattering bistro. Truthfully, he’d thought she’d be here by now, too.

Suddenly remembering what had jolted him into hurrying, he pulls out his phone and sees a missed call and a text.

The text turns out to be a picture message of a huge roadblock through a car windscreen. In the foreground of the image is a taxi fare counter already clocked at €64.70.

“She’s stuck in traffic,” he explains coolly.

Calvin offers his customary shrug, the carefreeness of which Arthur has only ever seen in old rich white men, the kind he’s fairly certain he won’t turn into one day, although only because he’s not entirely sure he’ll reach the _old_ part.

“Would you like to get started without her?” Arthur asks, reaching towards his suitcase, only to be pushed heavily by the old man.

“Oh for the love of God, Bentley, have a drink and stop working, will you? We’ve plenty of time for that when Olivier gets here.”

Calvin has always put Arthur in mind of a more affable version of Eames, which right now only serves to pick at his festering, mosquito bite mood.

Before it can show in his face, however, Valeria returns with their drinks. Calvin’s good humour spills over the table as easily as the sunshine from outside.

Arthur accepts the clink of cheers and sips his martini, taking in the vibrancy of the room made all the more colourful by the mirrors lining opposing walls, multiplying the crowd of day drinkers tenfold.

 _(Infinitely, love,_ Eames said, once, which had devolved quickly into an argument about a brand of physics that still rankles Arthur to think about.)

This will be his seventh job for Calvin Ross, whose own roots in dreamshare have led him to the comfortable position of being the medium between corporations and their hired dreamsharers, for those who prefer to keep sacred their anonymity.

He’s been in Murcia for almost two years now, which means he’s probably fixing to move on fairly soon.

Sure enough, after a generous sip of champagne, Calvin leans back in his chair with his hands clasped on his belly as he says,

“Gosh, I’ll miss this place.”

Arthur smiles into the rim of his martini glass.

“Where will you go next?” he asks, not for anything true, but for the snarling bearded grin he receives.

“You’ll know when you visit, Bentley.”

“Pick somewhere that speaks Italian, won’t you?”

Calvin snorts, chuckling over at Arthur with the patronisingly benign fondness of a distant relative.

“So, tell me. How’s business?”

Arthur licks the salt from his lips, crossing an ankle over his knee. His hands clasped loosely between his thighs.

“I thought you didn’t want to talk shop?”

Calvin winks with ostensible amusement.

“I was speaking more - ahem - broadly.”

Arthur shrugs one stiff shoulder. Now he’s had time to catch his breath, he’s ready to enjoy the moulded familiarity of what will be at least the next three weeks, judging by Calvin’s previous job requirements.

He doesn’t have many regular clients, but a man like Calvin Ross is hard to come by and greatly invaluable for it.

Outside, Murcia is bursting with life.

“I’ve been busy,” he says truthfully. “Lots of movement on my home turf. I’ve been keeping a low profile.”

“Yes, well. After the Sanchez debacle I’m not surprised.”

Arthur feels the burn of his ears and does his best not to duck his head, embarrassed.

Of course the old gentleman heard about that, retirement be damned.

“We got the job done,” he replies, cringing at how petulant it sounds to his burning ears.

Calvin seems to agree with this assessment, eyeing him mildly, though he doesn’t say anything more on the subject. His cautious, absolving judgement of Arthur is clear.

The older man’s champagne has disappeared quickly and it takes only a waggle of his fingers for Valeria to return, bottle in hand.

He carries a collected power in his presence, this man. Snow grey hair and beard, wearing his neat linen and violet silk cravat.

Before Arthur can summon either the courage to change the subject or the words to justify the apocalypse of the Sanchez Job, a wild movement catches his eye at the front of the bistro.

Olivier has arrived.

She’s harassed, sweaty and long-limbed. She too is cluttering a suitcase behind her and looking like she deeply regrets it.

“Fuck me,” she cries far too loudly from across the room, softening into a charming grin once she reaches the two men.

“Darling,” she croons, kissing Calvin’s cheek in a much smoother voice, the farmyard wiped out of her accent as cleanly as the scowl from her face. “Arthur, be a love, will you?”

She pushes her suitcase towards his chair and he slides it behind his own out of the way.

Her coppery hair is swept up out of her face in a long plait. Despite passing forty a few years ago now, she holds herself with an agitated energy, a teenager’s energy.

She takes a seat, calling out to the bar in rapid Spanish.

“So sorry,” she finally says as she takes a seat, gulping the glass of ice water Arthur offers her. “What the hell’s brought every sod and his mother to Murcia today? It’s a _Wednesday_ for the love of God.”

“Don’t fret, pet. Catch your breath,” Calvin says in a surprisingly gentle tone.

Olivier blinks at him, then brushes off her surprise, giving Valeria a grin as she brings a tall glass full of ice and clear liquid that is almost certainly eighty percent gin, if she’s the same person she’s been for the past six years Arthur’s known her for.

“So, have you found somewhere new yet?” she asks Calvin without precedent. Arthur shares her small, teasing smirk.

“Gosh, you’re a nosy pair,” Calvin replies with false aloofness. “Can’t a man have a few secrets?”

“No,” Olivier replies with a shark’s grin. “And you can’t have chosen anywhere yet, anyway. I haven’t given you the updated list of red zones.”

Calvin raises a suspicious eyebrow.

Arthur, sinking into the routine of their exchange, lets the busy bubble of the bistro wash over him, as well as the warm presence of his companions. This is exactly what he needs. An easy job with people he trusts.

It's about as close to a holiday as he's ever going to get, he thinks a little sullenly.

Olivier taps the crown of ice in her gin with a finger, splashing the drink lazily.

“Leon isn’t going to be allowed past India’s borders for a good few centuries. Salter is imposing on his own US ban after the Flagley-Hirst _thing._ On the other hand, you’ll be pleased to know Greece is back on the table.”

Calvin visibly tries not to look interested in this development.

His bristly jaw clenches briefly and he leans further back in his chair. His sly eyes flick to Arthur.

“And young Bentley here is probably avoiding Germany for now, hmm?” he asks.

Arthur blushes again, twisting his lips dryly.

“We cleaned up fine,” he says with obstinate conviction. “I’d be more than happy to meet you in Germany, _Mr Ross.”_

Olivier lets out a crowing noise, brash and throaty.

“Oh, I heard about that one. Did you actually get stuck in the penthouse for a day and a half?”

Arthur snorts, aggravated.

It’s not often he feels talked down to anymore. His somewhat formidable reputation as Dominick Cobb's bloodhound has seen to that.

People like Olivier and Calvin Ross, though. They wear their superiority with a careless scepticism over everything they look upon that makes Arthur feel even younger than he looks.

“That’s a gross exaggeration. It was a few hours and only happened at all thanks to some shoddy improvisation on the part of our Forger.”

The wrangling look of amused disbelief from Olivier is exactly what Arthur expects from her. After all, if she’s heard about the shitshow of Sanchez, it’ll have been directly from the horse’s mouth. Or perhaps the _ass’_ mouth would be better, being in this case the Forger in question.

What he doesn’t anticipate, however, is the sharp inhale of movement from Calvin.

Olivier’s brow twitches and Arthur purses his lips.

Discontentment doesn’t sit easily on Calvin’s face.

To be fair, he doesn’t often have reason to _be_ discontent. Swanning from one luxurious lifestyle to the next; working only with the best and only when it pleases him. The embodiment on the proverbial silver spoon.

Then again, Calvin’s always had a certain rapport with Eames, both being old money boys of particular privilege. He probably doesn’t like Arthur criticising his golden likeness, however deserved the criticism might be.

“I heard you just did very nicely out of a job with Jensen Armstrong, though,” Olivier says, pre-emptively dispelling whatever thunder lies ahead of that conversation.

It’s also possibly an olive branch in recompense for her teasing.

Arthur takes it easily. There’s no air-conditioning in here, only the occasional dusty breeze from the street. It’s far too hot for disagreements.

“He’s still a tool,” Arthur confirms, as if there had been any doubt to the contrary. The sneer on Olivier’s face says not. “Pretty interesting case, though. An heiress. There was a will and a secret second family and  whole paternity meltdown. _You’d_ have liked it.”

He directs this last at Calvin, who enjoys the flair for the theatrical, rather than Olivier, who is unsentimental and pragmatic.

“I do enjoy a good old fashioned family drama,” Calvin agrees, nodding thoughtfully, then segues coolly into a more businesslike tone, complete with an elbow on the table. He nudges his empty champagne flute aside. “Speaking of which, I’m afraid what I’m going to ask of you both - well. It requires some delicacy.”

The lines around his dark brown eyes are tighter than usual.

He rarely looks his seventy years - the the best Arthur has figured - but he does now, or at least close to it.

Olivier’s hand is tight around her glass.

Arthur keeps his body lax; nonetheless, he can feel the tension in his calves, like the shakes after an unprepared for run.

“We’re listening,” he says, so quiet it is all but lost in the hubbub of the bistro.

Calvin eyes them solemnly.

“I sent a team on a job for a close friend of mine. His niece has died under the most - most heinous of circumstances. He’s asked for my help.”

Olivier’s jaw is locked.

Arthur stares at the corded strain in her throat as she blankly looks at Calvin’s clasped hands.

“There was a hiccough in the plan, I’m afraid,” Calvin says. “They failed. I want you two to pick up where they left off.”

The back of Arthur’s neck prickles with loaded suspicion. He can see his own distrust reflected in Olivier’s green eyes.

“Failed how, exactly?” he asks immediately, no longer maintaining his loose limbed facade.

Calvin’s expression is sombre. Sweat is shining on the bridge of his pink nose.

“The job was sabotaged. Two days ago. Somebody tampered with their somnacin.”

“Who’s the prick -”

“Damson was the chemist,” Calvin interrupts Olivier’s fiery outburst with a sheet of ice in his tone. “He’s dead. It wasn’t his doing, it wasn’t  incompetence. It was a deliberate attack on the extractors. Now, I’ve suppressed the news as best I can for now but you both know how difficult it is to keep a secret from dream thieves.”

Arthur feels a familiar shift of discomfort in his gut.

He glances at Olivier, can see her mind whirring in sparks of fury  as she sits in stony silence.

“You want us to figure out who sabotaged their operation?” Arthur asks.

His voice feels hard in his mouth, rocks weighing down his tongue. He swallows painfully, can’t bring himself to take another sip of martini. Not even to wet his lips.

Calvin gives him an exasperated look.

“I want you to help figure out who killed my friend’s niece,” he says coldly.

“That’s absurd!” Arthur scoffs despite himself. “You’ve just lost an entire team and you expect the two of us to blindly wander into the same trap? Who was the team, besides Damson?”

Calvin’s expression is impenetrable. His face is sickly pale beneath the gold of his tan and his brown eyes are full of something unnameable. A needy righteousness, a righteous neediness.

“Arthur,” he says in an uncompromising tone. Across the table, Olivier is tense. “Now would be a very good time to remember every favour I’ve ever done you over the years.”

Arthur’s mouth goes dry. His tongue seems to shrivel inside his mouth and his spine stiffens to steel.

Yes, Calvin has done a lot for Arthur. There’s only really one _favour_ that matters though, and Arthur knows that’s exactly what the old man is talking about now.

Olivier’s eyes flit between them, dragonfly quick and just as bright. She clears her throat rustily.

“Well, I can’t say _I_ owe you a life debt,” she says darkly. “So how about you tell me exactly what’s going on, Calvin? What game are you playing here?”

“A little girl is dead,” Calvin replies in dismay.

“So is a team  of extractors,” Olivier hisses back, acidic. “Who did you hire? Who did you tell?”

“I took care of it,” Calvin snaps.

At the table beside them, a man turns slightly to angle himself closer to them. Arthur can see the line of his gun holster through the man’s thin jacket.

He feels a rush of scorn for the older man beside him.

For all Calvin’s personal finesse, his hired muscle are severely lacking in subtlety.

“You used Wallace, didn’t you?” he asks, unsure where the instinct comes from even as surety grips him.

Her hands trembling around her glass, Olivier makes a scoffing _pshaw_ sound.

Calvin, on the other hand, grimaces.

Olivier’s eyes widen.

“You wouldn’t,” she says with a tremor of shock. “Cal, he’s a fucking plague. Why would you call him? You should have come to us in the first place! Or, or called Leon or Eames or _someone,_ anyone.”

“I knew you wouldn’t -” Calvin starts, only to stop himself, swallowing anxiously. He’s rubbing his thumbs together in his lap, wincing. His head bows a little. “The job is very - there’s a lot at stake and I needed people who would do whatever it takes -”

“Excuse me?” Olivier snarls, much louder than Calvin’s forced calm. Her cheeks are flushed with fury. “You know I would do anything, _anything,_ Calvin. You know exactly what I’ve done. For you and for others. Arthur helped make an _inception_ happen less than a fucking year go, you distrustful wanker!”

Olivier lets out a barking hound laugh.

“There is nothing we won’t do if we can. And what, you decided you’d choose whoever had the loosest morals on your contact list instead? Let me guess. Damson, Wallace. Sala Hexa? Veronique? E-”

Olivier’s voice tangles up, barbed wire. Arthur feels it happen in his own throat, as he watches the blood drain from her face and her eyes flash in horror.

Even before he can think it, too, he feels his stomach convulse.

Olivier’s voice, weak in the bistro chatter. Sweat on her upper lip.

“Calvin,” she whispers. “Cal, tell me you didn’t call Eames.”

A screaming light blinkers inside Arthur’s head. A refusal so vehement it blocks out everything in a room of static.

He blinks, over and over, the sunshine dazzling as shock blows out his pupils and his breath solidifies in his lungs.

Calvin’s mouth is moving but Arthur can’t hear anything.

All he hears, a gruff undertone muffled by the humiliated reverb of rejection.

_I never stopped loving you._

A pair of dark grey eyes, glassy.The wreckage of Arthur’s heartfelt neglect.

Panic seizes him so fiercely it almost drags him from his seat.

The colour has returned to Olivier’s cheeks, crimson and then some.

The echoes of Eames’ voice swallowed up by the pillows of their shared spoil of a bed evaporate just in time to hear the sharp, skin loud _smack_ of Olivier’s palm cracking across Calvin Ross’ cheek.

Her heaving breaths rough in the shocked silence that follows and the man at the table beside him, he moves so quick.

An arm extends and Arthur can all but smell the metal of the gun he holds. He takes the man’s extended elbow and slams it down hard.

The gun clatters out of his hand and Arthur’s hand fists the man’s thick hair, bringing his face down to his knee in a satisfying crunch.

A second man lunges for Olivier but she’s already grabbed the first assailant’s lost weapon.

She cracks the gun into her attacker’s face, followed by a foot and he goes down, half dazed.

 _“Stand down!”_ Calvin Ross roars and Arthur feels indignation rise inside him at the man’s audacity, before realising Calvin is shouting at the two men. They immediately withdraw several paces from their targets, contrite and bruised.

“Your security’s gone to shit,” Olivier snarls, spitting blood onto the table from a hit the second man got in her teeth.

The bistro’s half cleared already in the midst of the flashmob fight. A semi circle of wary watchers eye them with consternation and Valeria, her curly brown hair tossed back over her shoulders, has something in her hand that might just be a pistol.

“Mr Ross, please,” she says pointedly, her head tilting towards a door in the back of the room.

Calvin nods wearily, standing with a deliberate sigh and indicating the door, too.

“You can’t blame them,” he says as breezily as he first greeted Arthur, a mere twenty minutes ago. He waves a dismissive hand at the two men in question. “There aren’t exactly many people stupid enough to lay a hand on me, these days.”

Arthur’s heart is thundering.

His mouth wobbles around several failed retorts but all he can really think is _Eames,_ all he can really hear is _I never stopped loving you,_ over and over and over. That timebomb trigger that left him defencelessly cruel in its aftermath.

Olivier follows Calvin through the tables on surprisingly steady feet. Her fists remain clenched at her sides.

Her lips are trembling around whatever words she’s biting back so desperately.

Arthur follows, his eyes locked tight on the black scrunchie holding her plait together. It rests between his protruding shoulder blades and it takes everything he has not to reach out and grab her shoulders.

The door leads to a softly lit corridor, at the end of which is a door.

The walls are lined with photos, mostly of opera singers. Arthur sees only a haze of blurred grey images as he follows them into the office, stacked with folders and smelling of whisky and incense.

Knees hollow with despair, he allows the hand that presses his chest to nudge him into a hard wooden chair. He can feel his insides cracking to ribbons of guilt and bone splinters.

Olivier remains standing.

Calvin takes a seat, too, looking solemn and not in the least but apologetic. His brow is creased.

Then Olivier puts her hands flat together, index fingers to her lips in mock prayer. She asks the question burning holes in Arthur’s tongue.

“He’s dead, then?”

Gipping in his throat, Arthur bows his head between his knees. His lungs are ash in his chest. He can’t believe it, can’t even _imagine_ it.

Calvin sighs a loud, breathy sound.

“He’s in a coma.”

Arthur sits up so fast he feels the wrenching crack of several knots in his spine, dizzy spots dancing in his vision.

Beside him, Olivier sinks almost to her knees, grabbing the back of the chair she initially refused, to keep from going down.

Arthur lets out a shaky laugh of relief by accident.

“Where is he?” he asks thickly.

Calvin gives him an odd look of bemusement.

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it fucking matters!” Olivier shouts before Arthur can.

He isn’t surprised. Olivier’s known Eames forever.

Longer even than Arthur’s supposed to know about.

“My dear,” Calvin says with such innocent bafflement. “He was mid-forge when the drugs caused the dream to collapse. If he’s at all functional, he’s been in Limbo for the past fifty hours  of real time already.”

“How do you know?” Arthur asks. His words crack against each other like dominoes and he coughs. “How do you know he was forging when it happened?”

Calvin’s mouth wraps a knot around his displeasure.

“Damson woke up at first. The som sickness took him after the first twenty-four hours. Veronique -” he ignores Olivier’s harsh laugh, “- is also in a coma. Wallace is dead.”

Arthur feels absolutely nothing for any of them. If Wallace’s long list of enemies is truly to blame, something that seems highly likely given the circumstances, all Arthur hopes is that he died with difficulty.

Olivier seems to share his thoughts.

She reaches back to tug at her plait, twisting the curled end around her finger like a totem.

“Tell me where he is, and if I get him back, I’ll help you find out who killed your granddaughter.”

Calvin startles. Arthur turns to her, frowning.

Olivier rolls her eyes, already wearing her Extractor’s mask of concentration.

“I don’t care how beneath you you’re pretending we are, Cal. You wouldn’t be so flippant with Eames’ sanity for anything less than your own flesh and blood.”

That very thought curdles inside Arthur, lemon and milk in his guts.

He sees, unwelcome, Dominick Cobb’s frantic face, furious and blameful. Mallorie’s sly blade beauty, her vengeance.

Calvin looks, not ashamed, but certainly uncomfortable as he fails to deny it.

The unfamiliar turn of his mouth is making Arthur’s anger stick in his throat.

“He’s in a hospital in Vienna," Calvin says, a faint shiver in his throat. "You’ll never believe what donating enough money to build a new cancer ward can do for getting what you want.”

Arthur really thinks he would.

Olivier’s out of the door before Calvin’s finished speaking.

It clacks shuts behind her with a slam,the very air behind her flinching in the wake of her wrathful energy.

Arthur makes to follow, only to be stopped by a reedy cough from Calvin.

He turns impatiently to find those dark eyes watching him with blatant curiosity.

“What?” he demands.

Calvin raises a single eyebrow. His hand scruffs over his beard on one side.

 _“She_ I foresaw,” he says, nodding after the redheaded wraith. “But you? After all this time?”

Arthur presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth, tonguing the back of his teeth.

Then Calvin continues in a cutting tone,

“I told him to let you alone. Told him you were as unmalleable in reality as you are in dreams. He wouldn’t have it, though.”

_(I never stopped I never stopped I never stopped I never stopped I never stopped I never stopped loving I never stopped loving you I never stopped I never stopped I never stopped)_

His words pierce Arthur through his constricted ribcage. He tries to nod.

It comes out as a torrid B flat of sound.

He means to leave, then. He means to walk out of the door without a care for whether or not he ever sees this man again, save to land his fist in his face if they're too late, followed by a merry bullet.

Instead, a strangled question escapes him first. He blinks rapid, childlike blinks and he asks, hurt pride and damaged trust,

“You were seriously just going to leave him to rot inside his own head?”

Calvin stares back at him, unflinching. An accusation in his eyes that’s potent enough to strike a fatal blow.

It would do, maybe, if Arthur hadn’t anticipated it already.

When Calvin doesn't answer, Arthur turns away.

“I’m sorry about your granddaughter,” he says with absolute sincerity.

Calvin watches him leave with a prowling gaze that follows him all the way out to the bistro’s front room again.

Blistering sunshine and tentative chatter.

The upturned chairs from their brief scuffle have been righted, most tables refilled with boisterous guests.

Valeria, now behind the bar, throws him a disapproving look. She turns to the outside where Olivier stands on the busy sidewalk with their luggage, already on her cell phone.

As he approaches she starts walking away, speaking in jabs of harsh Spanish and leaving him to take their bags.

He does so without really thinking about it.

It’s been eleven months since he’s blindly followed the striding whims of Dom Cobb, but Arthur was a soldier before he was a Point Man. He knows how and when to follow orders, even the unspoken ones.

Especially the unspoken ones.

Olivier stops short at a taxi rank a few streets away, stuffing the phone into the pocket of her cropped jeans. That agitated energy she carries is sparking; she reminds him of a racehorse in a paddock.

“We’re flying to Prague and getting a train from there,” she says briskly. “You _are_ using the Bentley passport?”

Arthur nods.

He always uses Bentley on these jobs. Force of habit, or perhaps sentiment. The kind Olivier wouldn’t really understand.

She shoots him a concerned look. He’d like to reassure her, but he’s not entirely certain he won’t throw up on their shoes if he opens his mouth.

The fear has settled into his lungs like a layer of dust, ready to choke him it too violently disturbed.

“Calvin fucking Ross,” Olivier mutters. “I should’ve shot him in the bloody eye. What the fuck was he thinking?”

Her tone shifts, barely noticeable. Arthur flinches, deafened by it.

They’re no longer talking about Calvin.

“I’ll bet you ten shitting grand he forged the kid. Fuck, he’s an idiot.  An arrogant sodding idiot. Serves him right, getting dropped if he’s going to pull a stunt like that.”

Arthur’s heart stammers at the reminder.

He glances down at his watch, painfully aware of where he got it from.

It’s not quite one in the afternoon.

A taxi glides up to them, Olivier’s hauling her suitcase into the trunk before Arthur can gather his sluggish thoughts.

Before he slides into the backseat, a hand takes his. Sweaty, slender. Spider curl grip.

Olivier gives him a tiny smile of worry.

There are creases in her eyes that don’t belong there. She looks very different, now, in a way Arthur can’t quite articulate.

“We’ll get him back,” she says, as full of promise as their first job together, that smooth murmur of _You can do this,_ belief and bravery and bronze medals for effort.

A promise she has no power to keep.

Arthur nods, silently.

He doesn’t speak  a word until they touch down in Prague.

.

.

Stepping off the plane into a dry windy evening, the sun kissing the skyline and the stars peeking through the pale grey dim, he turns to Olivier, to her face haggard with unease.

“Do you think he wanted us to come here?”

Olivier wipes a hand at her eyes, dusty with mascara. She stares ahead at the looming airport, as other passengers disembark around them.

He clings to the looks she gives him, a soft, dimpled look.

Why else would Calvin have mentioned the other team? Why not deceive them first, at least wait until they were too deep into the job to turn back?

Surely, as backwards as it might seem, this was what Calvin was hoping for?

Olivier puts her hand on his upper arm, lets go before it can burn too deep into his skin.

“If it makes you feel better to think that,” she says, leaving the judgement of his naivety hanging in the air, along with all of their unspoken fears.

.

.


	2. the woman with the right name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I make a snide comment about the NHS here. Please note, I will stand by the NHS until the end of my days - quite literally, probably. For any non-Brits out there, the NHS is pretty much the best thing the UK has ever done, but unfortunately isn't being treated well by the government at the moment.
> 
> Thanks very much for the kudos and comments! 
> 
> Love
> 
> LRCx

.

.

The train snakes through Austria’s countryside, high speed and lush green. 

Arthur keeps his forehead bruised cold against the window, staring absently at the flurry of darkening scenery as it passes, silhouetted monsters against a growling sky. 

Jitters are wreaking havoc through his nervous system. His toes are curled in his shoes; his tie is too tight at the collar. There are creases in the suit he changed into with muttering haste in a Prague airport bathroom. He keeps smoothing them over with nervous hands.

Opposite him, Olivier is pretending to sleep.

She’s sitting perfectly still, hands flat over each other on her stomach. She’s radiating a brittle serenity through her closed eyes that a stranger might believe, but not Arthur. He can see the tension in her torso like a flashing alarm light, its red beams reaching over to brush him with their painted perturbation.

The train is sleek. It smells of new carpet and freshly pinned leather and the staff that parade up and down are nicely dressed, wearing the exact same smile on each of their faces.

On the table in front of him is his laptop, browser full of open tabs of inconsequential clickbait. 

Nestled between a rather derogatory opinion piece on someone who might be a pop star and a social media newsfeed for yet another dodo who doesn’t know how to work their privacy settings, is a brief, overtly expressive article about an eight year old girl found dead in an Austrian apartment, along with her catatonic, paralysed mother.

_ Bryony Wright,  _ her name is. Gappy tooth grin of her last school photograph at the top of the page.

Also open, so innocuously small he could ignore it, if not for the clawing of the asps in his stomach when he looks at it.

An email, dated four weeks ago, long memorised by now.

_ A, _

_ Birthe Milgram is in need of a steady hand and a quick reader. She’s in Beograd.  _

_ Are you resting? _

_ E _

He hadn’t replied, the same as the last two emails from the past six months.

By the time he’d swallowed his pride and called Birthe, she’d already found herself another point, though she’d sounded disappointed to say no. 

Had Eames known, even then, he might need Arthur close by in case things went sideways? Or had it been a coincidence?

Arthur stares with impotent rage at the last three words of the email. He doesn’t think they were sent spitefully. 

For a professional liar, Eames can be obnoxiously sincere sometimes.

Then again, just because he was sending him a job, didn’t mean Eames wasn’t ready to take the opportunity to deliver a few swift kicks, too.

Arthur closes the account hastily. He’d tried tracking the origins of the email at the time, had found his way to an IP in the south coast of France and promptly given up, feeling frustrated and even a little foolish.

He can’t deny the irrepressible rage that is mounting inside him, that underwater earthquake of his very real anger. 

Anger at Eames for taking a job with scum like Wallace, for not  _ telling him  _ about it. Anger at Calvin Ross for trying to spearhead him into obedience with his unveiled threats, for taking advantage of Eames’ blind peacock narcissism and Olivier’s moral righteousness.

Anger at himself for not knowing exactly where Eames was already, for letting his own damaged pride come before the Forger’s well being.

Arthur returns to looking at the photograph of Bryony Wright, her blonde pigtails and the tidy blue shirt collar of her uniform. The proud smile plastered on her round little face, mask of her eager innocence, speaks louder than the dull platitudes of the journalist’s thesaurus full of tragedy.

The tannoy trills loudly in a delayed tune, and a pleasant feminine voice informs the passengers that they are close to reaching their destination.

Olivier’s eyes open instantly, acid green in the bright fluorescence of the train’s lights. Sunset is long past, now. The orange glow that swelled through the country, draping them in bright shadows, is already a murky bath of grey outside the rushing window.

Arthur packs his things with rapid efficiency. He shoulders his carry on easily, eyeing the redheaded woman as she stares down at the table, deep in thought.

Another tinny prompt from the PA. Passengers grumbling to their feet, shuffling cases and yawning as the clocks creep ever closer in the direction of midnight.

“Did you find a hotel?”

Arthur glances down at Olivier. She’s not looking at him; the question is almost lost in the rumble of the train’s roll towards the central station. All about them, the ripple of dark green outside has given way to pale storeyed buildings.

“Two rooms, ten minutes from the hospital,” he murmurs in reply.

“Bit close, hmm?” she says without admonishment.

He doesn’t think he’s imagining the edge of gratitude in her voice, though it’s as alien as the wobbling set of her mouth.

They drag their heavy cases, their heavier feet, towards the door of the train.

Olivier up ahead, her copper plait tightly wound and swinging with her movements.

Arthur pays strict attention to the back of her head, its familiar tilt. He can hear laboured breaths that aren’t his own in his ears, tries to shake them from his thoughts but they have stitched themselves into his very being.

He’s never been one to cultivate an eidetic memory; he accumulates details and maintains them only long enough to be of use, before discarding them like dust from shelves. 

So why can’t he erase it from his mind, that silken sadness that encased him in bitter loathing.

_ I never stopped loving you,  _ and it should have been tender, shouldn’t have been spat out like an insult, like love was a weapon to be wielded.

Olivier leads him out onto the platform when they come to a shaky stop, her back stiff and her eyes owl sharp.

There are smudges of mascara in the corners of her eyes. 

He sees her as he did the day they met, biting coyote with a taste for revenge.

.

.

The hotel, a whitewash of pastels. Little everything, the soap and the shampoo and the chocolate on the pillow.

A TV showing French soap operas and a print of a Klimt on the wall that looms ghostly over the bed, that mockery Kiss.

He lies on top of the covers in his boxers, the heating too high and the billowing steam of the shower still thick in the air.

The clock on the bottom of the television, white blue, faded into the night.

He watches it flick through the night, number to number, as if time is but a plaything of the day.

.

.

When it gets to ten to six, he gives up. Has another shower, even shorter than the first, scrubbing his nails into his skin.

He tries to take his time putting on his suit. Layering his armour carefully, the way he did when he still wasn’t very good at the eldredge knot and for some reason thought he needed to be. 

_ Breakfast from seven, _ the desk clerk had said. He walks down the long corridor, expecting to be the first one there.

A host greets him with a pale, early start smile. He’s wearing a formal apron, hair waxed in a tight parting that looks painful. 

He welcomes him into the restaurant, to the only already occupied table. Near the window, where the sun is already streaming in lines of white gold.

Olivier raises her coffee cup in cheers, looking solemn.

“Sleep well?” she asks with a wry grin that he doesn’t return.

.

.

The first time they met, Arthur was twenty-three. 

She was brutal, ill-tempered and lightning bright.

She spoke with a muddy accent that sometimes tilted into city speak, a hybrid of English farms and industrial steel forests.

Arthur had never considered himself to be much of a misogynist, but the visceral intimidation that racked through him was surprising, and he wondered if maybe he’d never met a woman like Olivier before.

.

.

He knows, now, that he hadn’t.

He knows, too, that he still hasn’t now.

.

.

“Has he contacted you?” Arthur asks as they weave through the early risers in the street.

She’s half a step ahead. Her hair loose and curled, dressed to match Arthur in pinstripes and charcoal.

She’s got a pair of sunglasses on her head. She plays with them as she walks, a large handbag on her shoulder while Arthur carries two briefcases, one significantly heavier than the other.

“Cal?” she asks needlessly. Then, a slanted shrug. “Not yet. His pal Esther sent some details, but he knows better than to try himself.”

The hospital is unmissable. It looms high above its surroundings, a great block on the wide horizon.

Arthur takes a steadying breath, cold in his lungs.

“Do you know where he is?” he asks.

They’re almost at the entrance, now. Sheer glass and ninety degree angles, all of it.

Olivier just throws him one of her shark sharp looks as the automatic doors glide open.

There’s a desk, tall, covered in a neatly arranged pamphlets. A short queue already formed and several patient looking receptionists.

Olivier heads straight towards them, that thrumming teenager’s energy that bounces in her heels.

A fumble of languages between shy German, bumbled English and French. She’s very good at the embarrassed foreigner front, the toss of her hair around her long shoulders, the bite of her lower lip.

“Stacey Farris,” she says, when the receptionist asks in timorous English.

The receptionist looks down at her files, and her eyebrows twitch high into her face.

“We tried to contact you, Miss Farris,” she says. “You are the only family listed.”

Arthur turns to stare blankly at the side of Olivier’s face as she replies, “New number,” dismissively shrugging, as if Arthur’s chest isn’t audibly cracking beside her.

She does, however, avoid his gaze when they’re directed to the correct floor of the hospital.

The doors of the elevator close behind them with a  _ bing  _ and Arthur rounds on her, louder than he means to.

“Why the fuck are you on his list?”

Olivier’s tongue presses into the hollow of her cheek. Her face a mask of boredom and Arthur, jittering with anxiety and impotence and a very petty wound of betrayal.

“Olivier-”

“Of course I’m on his list,” she hisses to him, still looking straight ahead. The hand clutching her bag is bone white. “Who else has he fucking well got?”

Arthur grits his teeth, biting back the snarl of a reply that he wants to shout, very loudly in her face.

(It isn’t true, after all.)

He feels sick. He feels dirty and powerless and Eames’ voice in his head, that tepid murmur of broken vowels. The slick trail of a tongue down the dip of his spine and hands curled too possessively around his hips, those fingerprint bruises left behind unasked for, cherished.

Before he can open his mouth, though, she continues,

“It’s been almost three days since he was dropped, Arthur.” 

Two nurses enter at the second floor, their chatter fading as they enter the elevator. The younger of the two thumbs the seventh floor button, before they continue their conversation in low, clipboard voices.

Olivier’s eyes, burning into his collarbone.

“Let’s not argue about who deserves to be his one phone call, hmm?”

They reach their floor before he can find a way to retort that doesn’t make him sound like the most self-centred asshole that ever lived. His heart tastes of ash in his throat, clogging his airway and coating his tongue.

The hospital smells the same as every other hospital he’s ever been in, which is more than he’d care to mention.

He follows her, choking on his own entitlement, and is so distracted by the desire to not look at her that he almost walks into her back when she stops outside a closed white door.

Arthur swallows dryly, his palms damp around the handles of his briefcases as they tug his arms towards the ground. The back of his neck, ants and webs.

Olivier turns to him, a hand on his elbow, unapologetic and understanding. Then with a hasty shove, she opens the door and walks into the hospital room.

.

.

_ Are you resting?  _ the email read and Arthur swore loudly, threw his phone onto the bed and went out for a long, uneasy walk through the shallow streets of Austin’s outskirts.

.

.

_ He’s in a coma,  _ Calvin had said. 

Eames is a coma, Arthur has thought to himself, over and over in rationalised normalcy, until it doesn’t make bile burn his throat.

They enter the room with such foreboding, Arthur feels that burn come back.

Eames looks, quite frankly, not awful.

Then again, he’s in a perfectly well funded hospital, being taken care of by well trained staff who have the added incentive of a very rich benefactor to encourage their attentiveness.

It would be disturbing if Eames looked anything other than a pasty shade of asleep, really.

He’s lying utterly still on the only bed in the room, his arms tucked straight by his sides and his hair brushed over. He’s in need of a shave and his skin is pale, but he looks otherwise unharmed.

Arthur stands just inside the doorway and feels a bizarre tightness in his stomach, like a hand around his intestines, knotting uselessly into his kidneys.

Olivier, meanwhile, seems mostly unaffected as she walks over to the bed, draws up a wide plastic chair and promptly takes a seat within arm’s reach of Eames’ left hand.

The room, softly lit, the blinds half drawn.

Eames, motionless, as indifferent to Arthur’s presence as a stranger’s.

Those cheekbones, more prominent, that fit to his cupped palm from years of practise.

There’s a howling rage inside him. He can feel it stirring as he walks tentatively to the other side of the bed, eyes on its occupant. It’s caged for now,  that creature, the key melted down into cinders along with everything else Arthur finds unwelcome in his heart.

It won’t keep for long, though. It’s rattling its prison bars and it wants to be let loose.

“Right then,” Olivier says in a loud, practical voice. It jars the stillness of the room, a sterile emptiness that sits uncomfortably between them. 

Her hand is on the bed, parallel to Eames’.

“I’ll see if I can bribe one of the nurses to keep an eye out for us. Do Austrians pay medical staff shit, too? Can’t ever bloody remember. If there’s one good thing about a badly treated NHS, it’s that it makes for easy bribes.”

She’s muttering as she roots through her bag, her hair covering her pinched face.

“I’ve got enough for a few hours, but we’ll need more. You go under and check out the lay of the land. If he’s that deep, we’ll need to -”

“Hey, wait, what now?” Arthur scoffs, halfway to sitting in a matching chair on Eames’ other side.

Olivier looks up at him expectantly, her brow crumpled.

“Well you’ll need to check out a first level. See if his subconscious is stable enough to -”

“Why me?” Arthur splutters, dropping the cases with heavy  _ thunks  _ at his feet and recoiling into his chair.

Olivier’s face scrunches, perplexed by the fervor of Arthur’s refusal. He can feel his cheeks reddening.

“I’m sorry,” she replies with a sneer. “I was under the impression you wanted to  _ help?” _

Arthur purses his lips, a hand rubbing the thin skin of his throat distractedly. He looks down at Eames, at the impossible quietude of his unsleep.

Of  _ course  _ he wants to help. He wants to reach right into his skull and pull him out of whatever torments he’s suffering before the damage is irreversible. Before he forgets what’s important in this world, and Arthur, he’s enough of a bastard to know, at the end of the day, he wants to find him before he forgets  _ Arthur. _

The ringing of his guilt like a bell tolling, a voice that is younger, more fragile.

_ Don’t you dare ever do that again, do you hear me? _

“Why can’t you go under with him?” he asks Olivier, her wan expression and her pinched mouth.

“What’s wrong, Arthur?” she asks, like she can’t even guess.

Arthur’s mind scrambles into action. He’s unpacking the PASIV just for something to do, can smell the plastic slip of gloves and IV tubes, the squeak of the waxed floors.

“I am  _ not  _ going to be welcome inside his head, Olivier,” he says darkly. “You should -”

“For God’s sake, Arthur, get over yourself,” she snaps, too haughty, too flushed. 

Something’s wrong, not only with  _ Arthur,  _ he realises, but with  _ her. _

He stares open mouthed at her; the white light of the room paling out the bags under her eyes, harsh over her soft features..

“Why can’t you go under with him?” he asks again, but there’s an edge to it this time, a threat.

Why  _ can’t  _ she?

Olivier’s lips curl around whatever denial she musters, peppercorns and pique.

She puts the case of somnacin vials onto the table near Eames’ head, is already tying up her hair in a loose clasp as she averts her gaze from Arthur’s accusation. Hornets in her hands, in his head.

“I made a promise,” she says, hospital voice. A mother’s voice. 

There was a time when he thought, maybe, she had children of her own. Then he realised, one day, she only used to.

“I can’t break that promise, Arthur.”

Arthur would like to tell her that he has one better, that he harbours not a promise but a visceral threat that has held back his hand from the flesh of Eames’ subconscious for years. 

He doesn’t know if has the words.

“You’re going to have to break it, Olivier,” he says, brassy winter on his tongue like brambles. “Because it’s not about  _ won’t,  _ alright? It’s about  _ can’t.” _

“Oh yeah,” Olivier laughs loudly, an ugly sound that rings through the air and how, how the fuck has this derailed so quickly? Are they really going to sit here exchanging barbs over Eames’ unconscious body, while he burrows himself into the pit of his own mind before their very eyes? “Since when?”

“Since always,” he retorts through gritted teeth. 

Olivier, disbelieving. Eames, unmoving.

Olivier cocks her head.

“Well that’s bullshit,” she snorts. “We’ve worked together for years, Arthur, I think you -”

“And how many times do you recall me going into Eames’ subconscious, hmm?” 

She stops short at that, her eyes drifting in a slight glaze as she visibly tries to remember. There’s a tiny crease in her brow, thoughtful, rejecting.

When she looks back at him, there’s uncertainty there for the first time.

“You have to have done,” she says, shakes and sharps.

It’s Arthur’s turn to laugh now, and he’d love more than anything for it be like hers, a powerful hyena cackle of knowingness.

It comes out winded, a disappointed sound meant for children and caged animals.

“I can’t go inside his head. I never have and I never will.”

He expects her to question it further, to pull out the savage instruments of her long history of knowing what she shouldn’t, of asking what nobody else dares.

She doesn’t.

There’s something very sad lingering in her expression, a wretchedness that doesn’t belong there.

He had assumed - wrongly, he now wonders - that Olivier’s determination to come for Eames was a duty bound morality, the same motivator that Arthur has seen drive her through countless unpleasantries and a great number of ill-omen jobs.

He had expected denials, refusals, maybe a demand for proof. Yet she’s looking at Arthur, forlorn copper faun, and she looks, bizarrely, like she’s about to cry. 

She looks resigned, looks reserved. She looks like a woman about to break a deep and binding promise.

“I’m sorry,” she says with unwitting misery.

This, he did not expect.

Arthur returns his focus to the PASIV, which he lays out on the foot of the bed, open at the hinge.

A hand reaches awkwardly over Eames’ shins to take his wrist. Her nails bite into the thin stretch of skin over his veins, the silver band on her ring finger colder than the rest of her.

“Arthur, look at me,” she commands and he obeys.

Her face the stone of Medusa and her pity like a thunderstorm above their heads.

She says, in a cautious voice, that mother’s voice of hers:

“I recruited Eames.”

It’s spoken with such feverish intent, such unconceivable regret. As if in any possible version of this great and terrible world it is a bad thing that dreamshare has a man like Eames to hand, as if she is to blame for these ills and woes. 

“He’d never so much as seen a PASIV before we met. The circumstances of our meeting were,  _ unfortunate. _ If Eames’ subconscious can’t take an intrusion, not even from  _ you…” _

She drifts sideways, and her eyes falter between Arthur’s face and his hand.

“Well, that’s my fault. Not yours.”

She’s lying. 

Arthur can see it in the set of her eyes, feel it through her palm on his wrist like a whisper. 

More than that, he  _ knows  _ she’s lying. He knows who Eames really is, even if Olivier doesn’t think he does. He knows who they are and what they did, that they escaped through the blood and teeth-skin of sheer will alone. 

He knows all about the stolen PASIVs and the trail of corpses and the manhunt through Europe; the months spent in Africa, drifting like grains of sand in the wind through the unknown, into the event horizon of their exile.

But he can’t tell her that. He has to believe her, has to pretend to believe her, maybe he even  _ wants  _ to.

Because the guilt in her eyes is real, even if the rest of it isn’t. If Olivier wants to shoulder the burden as to why Eames’ subconscious would do anything to tear Arthur out of himself, then perhaps he should let her.

He puts his own hand on top of hers, tighter than he means to. He’s never noticed it before, but there’s a thin streak of silver running through the topmost strands of her hair, so fine it could be mistaken for glancing light on her bronze head.

Olivier takes a deep, shuddering breath.

“We can go together,” she says, sounding more like she’s suggesting they jump out of the window hand in hand.

Arthur shakes his head.

“It won’t work,” he warns her.

That confidence she carries, that reminds him so much of a long forgotten version of the man lying between them.

“Yes it will,” she replies, extracting her hand from between his own and removing a vial of somnacin from the little black case.

She hands it over and slips out of the room, no doubt in search of an underpaid employee.

Arthur glowers at Eames’ slack face as his hands move on autopilot, arranging the PASIV with deft neatness.

“Don’t shoot me,” he says darkly, not for the first time.

He unravels the IV lines and inspects the somnacin, labelled in what looks like very scruffy Arabic.

His breaths are too sharp in his throat, he tries to steady them as he works.

Only once, he reaches too far over and his hand brushes against the cool skin of Eames’ arm. He flinches, micro terror, then lets out a breathless laugh.

Embarrassment crawls up his throat in a blush, and he takes the greatest of care as he slits the needle point into Eames’ inner wrist, feels the thready throb of his pulse and shivers, grave afraid.

He’s all set by the time Olivier returns, her expression steelier than when she left. She returns to her seat, barely paying attention as she fiddles with the needle Arthur hands her, still wrapped in sterile packaging.

“Lovely young man called Gerrard is going to keep us locked in,” she says. 

Arthur glances at the door, half expecting to see the man standing outside, but of course there’s nobody. Olivier’s always had an acute knack for choosing the right people for a job, any job, even the smallest of tasks.

It’s a skill he’s never really cultivated, not without entrenching himself in a great deal of background research to back up his cautious instincts.

His mouth is suddenly very dry. He can feel panic rising in his chest, swallowing whatever air he manages to suck in through bitten lips.

He forces himself to lie back in his chair, the sting of the needle, Olivier’s eyes never leaving him.

If she notices his hands shaking as he tucks them under his thighs, she doesn’t mention it.

“Ten minutes,” she says, reaching forward to send them under. 

Arthur glances very briefly at Eames’ slack face, then stares directly into the harsh white light above them in a strip of alien blue.

His fear catches in his throat. Sleep grabs him with both hands and he plummets to the iron will its demands.

.

.

“Arthur?” Olivier asks, a shake in her voice, a wasteland. This desolation that was once a mind, a burnt out shell of a house.

They’re outside. Tt’s thunder and lightning and the rain doesn’t fall, just hangs above them in stilted dismay at their presence.

Olivier’s face, horrified. Arthur turns, just in time to see a projection dressed in military greens reach forward. 

He ducks, a hand in his hair pulling hard and he cries out. The barrel of a gun in his throat, bruising the root of his tongue, and before he can do more than yell a shapeless vowel, the bullet tears through his windpipe.

.

.

He wakes up, panting, rips the needle from his arm and drops of blood come free, splashing as he staggers up out of his chair.

Olivier’s awake, too, sitting perfectly still as she watches him back up against the window, heaving.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” he mutters and shakes, his hands on his knees.

He screws his eyes shut, gipping and panicking. There’s a ruinous sound chugging out of him, a cry without tears. 

Olivier’s voice, very calm and very cold.

“Arthur, calm down.”

She doesn’t get up, doesn’t even reach for the needle still pinned in the crook of her elbow.

“Arthur, breathe, you’re fine. Arthur, stop it.”

It’s incredibly unhelpful. 

Arthur swallows and chokes, wants to curse out the rest of the room, conscious and otherwise, but he can’t find the words. 

He’s turned, face to the window to press against the chilly glass while his hands hold his throat like a rookie unsure if he’s dead or awake.

“Arthur,” she says like it’s his real fucking name.

“I’m fine,” he rasps in a lie she doesn’t bother acknowledging.

“Arthur,” she says again. “What the hell was that?”

“I  _ told  _ you,” he growls, stooped and self-conscious, writhing with the insects that are crippling his veins. “I told you I can’t - I wasn’t  _ exaggerating, _ Olivier. I can’t go inside his head.”

She doesn’t respond to that. 

Arthur gulps air until it reaches his shrunken lungs, until his knees feel strong enough to hold him upright and he looks back at her, at her wary expression, her wide round eyes.

He licks his lips with a dry tongue, breathing loudly.

“I’m no use to you here,” he says, and he doesn’t mean it, or maybe he does.

For a single terrifying moment, he thinks she’s about to agree with him.

Then she cocks her head to one side, frowning slightly, and bites her upper lip.

“Not like this,” she says. 

She looks at Eames’ face, which Arthur is suddenly finding far too painful to bear. He looks back to the window, through the slits in the blinds that reveal blue skies and the stretch of Vienna, its intangible serenity.

There’s a shuffling sound behind him, then,

“We need a chemist.”

Arthur disagrees violently, though doesn’t say as much, because it’s true. As the panic subsides into muscle quivering defeat, he bows his head, leaning into the pull of his neck.

“We need someone who knows Eames. Someone who’s worked with him recently and isn’t going to screw us over. Preferably someone whose silence we can buy.”

She’s only thinking aloud, doesn’t need Arthur’s input at all, really, but he lets out a groan all the same.

“Shit,” he says, slowly turning on weary feet.

Olivier’s looking at him, confused.

“Do you know someone?”

Arthur’s teeth grind together as he tries his level best to maintain some facade of neutrality, despite the bitter displeasure in his gut.

“Yeah,” he says reluctantly. “He’s good, and he will be more than happy to keep his mouth shut for a price.”

He can’t keep the disgust out of his tone, can’t refuse the disappointment he feels at breaking his own promise to himself.

(In LAX, not yet a year ago. Dominick Cobb’s retreating back, stiff with anxiety.  _ Never again,  _ he’d thought to himself, had promised himself, never again will he stoop to the whims of others, will he compromise on what he knows is best.)

Olivier’s eyes, expectant, her hand covering the entry point of the needle in her vein.

Arthur takes off his suit jacket and hangs it on the back of the chair.

“He’s in Mombasa,” he says. “And he won’t go under, but he could probably be persuaded to come to Vienna.”

Olivier nods, asking no more. 

Her hand moves from her own arm to Eames’, a curve of nervous fingers as she clears her throat.

“Could you give him a call?” she asks without looking away from Eames’ unresponsive hand. “I’ll try again, see what I can find.”

Arthur’s already rooting for his phone in his pocket, recalcitrant and exhausted.

He’s close enough to the PASIV to send her back under, and at her sidelong glance he does, but not before resetting the timer to twenty minutes.

Olivier’s eyes flutter closed, her shoulders slumping a little as she sinks into sleep.

Arthur spares her one more glance, before dialling the number into his phone with a jabbing, contemptuous thumb.

It rings for close to a full minute before a voice answers.

_ “Yes?” _

The voice is unsurprised, almost suspicious.

“Yusuf, it’s Arthur.”

_ “Yes?”  _ Yusuf says again, even more suspicious now.

He’s totally aware of how unlikely it is Arthur would call him in anything other than an act of desperation.

“I’m in Vienna and I need you to come here right now.”

Yusuf lets out a blasting laugh.

_ “I should think you’d prefer anyone else to come to Vienna, wouldn’t you, Arthur?”  _ Yusuf asks with a trace of his own contempt.

Arthur lets out an impatient huff, retaking his seat beside the bed and tapping his fingernail on his phone.

“Eames is in trouble, Yusuf. I need your help.”

Yusuf lets out a clear, truculent sigh.

He owes Arthur nothing, and in truth Arthur knows Yusuf owes Eames nothing, too. Still, without Eames Yusuf wouldn’t have scored the biggest hit of his career to date.

Granted, he also wouldn’t have come close to being dropped into Limbo, but still. Arthur will simply have to hope Yusuf’s gratitude for no small fortune and an expanded reputation outweighs his begrudgement for coming close to losing his life and sanity.

He waits, sitting quite literally on the very edge of his seat, his free hand gripping his knee tightly in anticipation.

Yusuf sighs again, a muttering of calculations, then,

_ “How much?” _

“However much you want,” Arthur replies instantly, already racking up the bill he can send to Calvin by an additional few thousand for sheer irrefutable inconvenience.

Yusuf hums, audibly interested.

_ “Very well,”  _ he says.  _ “But I can only give you a week.” _

Arthur nods uselessly, staring at Olivier’s face.

Her mouth twitches down in her sleep, and one hand flinches. Something’s wrong.

“Yusuf,” he says as calmly as he can manage. “I’m hoping very much to be finished in three days.”

He expects jovial agreement. A congratulations on his ambition, perhaps, or gratitude for not wasting time.

Instead he’s met with a cynical silence. Then Yusuf’s voice, darkening with unease.

_ “Arthur, what sort of trouble are we talking?” _

Snakes in his stomach, their fangs sharp. Arthur swallows loudly.

“We’ll get him back,” is all he can think to say. “Bring everything you have. I’ll text you the details.”

He puts the phone down before he can make out Yusuf’s indignant retort. 

His fingers are still trembling, and so are Olivier’s. 

He walks quickly around the bed, grabs the back of her chair and pulls hard.

She flails instantly, a gasp of sound as her hands grab at thin air. Only Arthur’s leaning weight keeps her from toppling.

_ “Shite!” _ she cries, gagging on air as he chair thuds back onto all four legs. 

Her eyes on Eames, then on the ground. She catches her breath quickly.

Arthur moves to return to his seat, but Olivier grabs him hard as bruises.

She looks up at him, full of doubt, reaching for the PASIV to pull out the dream.

“He’s in there,” she says, troubled and torn. “But he’s deep.”

Shadows of fury that shroud her, and in turn Arthur, standing too close to escape it.

“I was right,” she says bitterly. “He  _ did  _ forge the girl, stupid prick.”

“Is she down there?” he asks, not really wanting to know the answer, even as Olivier nods.

Strands of hair have come undone from her clasp. She clacks her teeth together uncomfortably.

“Dead,” she says, a cracking condemnation of a word.

Arthur holds his breath, noxious and thick.

He pulls himself from Olivier’s grasp, only to find he doesn’t have it in himself to sit down again. He returns to standing at the window, the slats of light and emanating cold.

He crosses his arms over his chest, and the sickly horror in Olivier’s eyes pierce him.

Arthur looks at Eames. At the face that fits neatly in the crook of his neck, the hands that have bruised his waist and cupped his chin, rough and tender and never without intent.

_ Whatever you do, _ he said, once,  _ don’t let me die in a forge. _

He’d dismissed it as paranoia, as vitriolic teasing, the same way he’d say obtuse things like  _ Do you want to check under my skirt, doll?  _

It wasn’t though, and he knew it, even as he dismissed it at the time.

_ Don’t let me die in a forge,  _ Eames said.

Arthur feels it now, the weight of it. Like the corpse of a little girl, heavy in his arms.

.

.


	3. the chemist with the red notebook

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey darlings,
> 
> Just to clarify, I don't think Arthur is completely foolish. I think he does know more than he ever lets on about what happened to Dom and Mal that made her lose her sense of reality.
> 
> At the same time, though, I think Arthur probably has a huge amount of denial to protect himself from the truth, and honestly, I wouldn't judge him for it.
> 
> Would love to hear (well, read) your thoughts and feelings.
> 
> Love love,  
> LRCx

.

.

(The first time Eames’ subconscious rips Arthur apart, something inside him breaks. It’s the final confirmation, he realises, that he cannot give back what he stole from Eames. He cannot cauterise the wound the same way he caused it, so cleanly, so simply, with the blade sharp focus of a soldier under friendly fire.)

.

.

Yusuf arrives mid-afternoon the following day, which is, for want of a better word, miraculous.

Arthur collects him from the airport, partly out of courtesy and partly for efficiency.

Mostly, though, it’s to get away from the hospital.

Olivier, who despite her glassy eyed return to the world of waking upon escaping Eames’ decimated subconscious is stoically maintaining her dispassionate front, has set up base camp in the private hospital room, which already has a rotating guard as reliable as Buckingham Palace, though much less elaborate.

At least, that’s what Olivier says. Arthur’s yet to actually see anyone so much as glance in the direction of Eames’ room, save for her man Gerrard, but that’s the point really, so he doesn’t question it.

There’s now a table in the corner beneath where the TV is mounted, switched off, and Olivier seems perfectly at ease sitting at it, working her way through diagrams of the dream layouts designed by Wallace and forwarded on to her by an associate of the contrite Mr Ross.

Arthur, on the other hand, is having trouble staying in the room for more than half an hour at a time.

It’s not like this is the first time he’s ever had to research somebody close to him.

Those futile fumbling months that culminated in Mallorie Cobb’s death had, after all, involved a good deal of digging into the past of a dear friend in the hope of finding something salvageable, all the while Dom peering over his shoulder, vulture of needy fear.

It isn’t even the first time he’s had to research Eames, not by a long shot.

Still, it leaves a bad taste in his mouth that can’t be washed away, to compile a list of all Eames’ aliases, to cross-reference them, most recently used against most regularly used.

Whoever Eames is down there, he won’t be himself, not entirely. It’s doubtful he’ll be a little girl with blonde pigtails and a gap-tooth smile, though, either.

Not even Eames, who has forged creatures more pitiful than Arthur can bear to imagine in reality, would have the stomach to maintain a forge so brutal for so long. His subconscious would wriggle free of it, Arthur is sure, even if he’d forgotten how to do it consciously.

Arthur tries not to think about that too much, though.

Instead he picks an agitated Yusuf up from the airport, drives him in a rented Fiat back to the hospital just shy of alarmingly fast.

“You look stressed,” Yusuf says with all the subtlety of a braying walrus.

He’s sitting shotgun with his chemistry case on his lap, staring shamelessly at the side of Arthur’s face while the radio mumbles too quiet to be fully heard.

Arthur cracks his jaw self-consciously.

“We’re short on time,” he says truthfully. “We need a compound that will dampen his awareness.”

Yusuf isn’t wearing his patented sly curiosity. What sits heavily over his features instead is a cloud of disapproval, which feels incredibly hypocritical  of him.

Arthur feels him staring uncomfortably as he pulls up at a red light.

“You want to diminish the militarisation of a man already lost in Limbo?”

Arthur doesn’t appreciate the implication in the slightest.

His fingers tighten around the steering wheel, thumbs tapping arhythmic as he drives.

On a Wednesday in December, he asked, _Have you ever seen thunder and lightning in a snowstorm?_ His eyes were alight and his voice butter silk.

“We don’t have a choice,” Arthur replies and it tastes acrid, like lies.

Yusuf makes a snorting sound, arms wrapping tighter around the case in his lap.

“I hadn’t realised  you were so attached,” he says in a delicate voice.

Arthur laughs. It’s an hysterical, hard sound that chafes his throat, the muscles in his face refusing to crease around his false smile.

What he means to say is: _I’m not._

What he means to say is: _It’s not like that._

Instead, Arthur’s traitorous tongue trips somersaults over his baffled excuses and he replies:

“You have no idea.”

Yusuf’s eyebrows raise so high, they look in danger of disappearing into his scalp. His surprise, however, seems suspiciously tempered.

As if he was shocked, not so much by the revelation, rather by the the fact that Arthur had dared to say it out loud.

Arthur bites the inside of his lower lip, feels the tender bruise he’s worrying into it.

Yusuf makes a smug, inquisitive sound that jerks an involuntary flex in Arthur’s wrists.

“Not a word of this, Yusuf,” Arthur says, giving up preemptively on the cumbersome denial his brain throws boomerang at his mouth.

Yusuf laughs, a dry chafing sound.

“Who would believe me?” he scoffs and Arthur grimaces.

Because the answer, it might be _nobody,_ but it also might be _everybody_ and it hurts to think of either being true.

.

.

He thinks about it. Really thinks, more than he wants to, more than he would dare to.

He’s aware that a lot of people assume he and Eames have had sex before, or will do at some point.

Even Stamford, the grizzled brooder of an Architect who had worked with them on the Hinkley Job and said maybe ten words in total the whole time, had actually thrown a condom packet at them once just to break up an argument.

Eames had laughed, picked it up and offered it to Arthur, who had promptly turned on his heel with his nose in the air and stalked out of the room.

(He doesn’t know what Eames did with the condom. Only that if he used it, it wasn’t with Arthur.)

The truth of it is painfully simple, really.

Arthur, he doesn’t just love Eames. He actually _likes_ Eames most of the time, when he isn’t being cruel, when his barbed defences allow for it.

So, he thinks, people probably would believe Yusuf if he decided to get loose lipped, if only because they wanted to.

They’d believe him, and then it would really be over, for good this time. It would be over the very second someone saw an opening to take advantage of the soft belly of their affection, like the last time Arthur was stupid enough to let something as dangerous as falling in love be a thing worth admitting to.

Beside him, Yusuf’s unvoiced thoughts are deafening.

Arthur chews the raw inside of his lip, flicks the indicator and takes the third exit for the hospital too quickly, leaving a trail of blaring car horns in their wake.

.

.

They walk side by side, and Arthur’s ears burn under Yusuf’s coffee pot stare.

There’s something tickling the nerves inside his spinal cord, like somebody standing heavy footed on his grave.

.

.

“He’s only down two levels,” Olivier greets them as they enter the hospital room.

She’s swinging on a wheeled computer desk chair that she must have stolen from the nearest reception, and upon seeing who follows Arthur inside, her feet plant themselves on the floor.

“Oh,” she says, bemused. “Hello.”

“Ollie,” Yusuf replies, looking just as mystified.

Then he gives a grim nod, eyes lingering on Eames’ sagging pillow routine.

“Arthur,” Olivier says in a chastising tone. “You didn’t tell me you knew Sanin.”

“He doesn’t,” Yusuf replies over Arthur’s frown, a wide eyed warning in his face.

Arthur harbours precisely zero interest in whatever else Yusuf gets up to under his other aliases, although he is mildly impressed that Yusuf thinks he has anything to be ashamed of admitting to in front of Arthur, whose own name was dishonourably stricken from all of his own country’s military records for his misdeeds.

He walks straight across the room without commenting, scooping up Olivier’s notes.

“How do know it’s only two levels?” he asks, skimming over her dizzying calculations of how much time at each possible level has passed since Eames was dropped.

“I don’t, exactly,” she huffs, disgruntled, returning to swinging in quarter circles where she sits. “But according to Wallace’s details of the job, it was a basic scare extraction. They reconstruct the attack, complete with little Bryony, and platter up the mother’s repressed memories to do the rest.

“Lazy bastard. I can’t actually believe Eames would let him. He _had_ to have a backup plan in place.”

She sounds incredibly put out, keeps her eyes on Eames as she says it.

Arthur knows he and Olivier have very differing expectations of the Forger.

To Arthur, Eames is an improviser. He is the wildcard that regularly tests the boundary of untrustworthiness, even occasionally breaking it. He might be the ideas man, but he usually has too many of them at once to be useful without someone filtering them for him - usually a begrudging Arthur, he thinks a little resentfully.

That’s not who he is for Olivier, though.

No, she rules her teams with ringmaster strength and Eames, he is the lion that leaps without hesitation through the precise, blistering rings of fire she lays out for him.

Arthur thinks, maybe, Olivier has no idea who Eames is when she isn’t there to curb his imagination, or maybe who Eames is at all.

Which is absurd, which is uncomfortable. Which is a cruel and pointless accusation, so he doesn’t bother voicing it.

“So he might not have dropped to Limbo? If he’s not that deep,” he says, hurricane cautious, because surely that’s a _good_ thing, a _great_ thing, so why does Olivier still look so morose?

She scrunches her nose in distaste.

Out of the corner of his eye, Arthur can see Yusuf perusing Eames’ medical notes, clipped to the foot of his bed like a label in a zoo.

“Limbo isn’t about depth,” Olivier chides, patience tested teacher, ten seconds before the bell rings. “It’s about construction and control.”

Arthur frowns, can’t contain the tiny shake of his head.

“No, I remember Cobb going-”

“Oh?” Olivier laughs, her eyebrows arched, mouth to match. “Dominick Cobb? You mean the man who dropped his wife into Limbo and let her mind rot to mush?”

 _“That’s not-”_ Arthur snarls, cutting himself off with teeth clenched nutcracker hard.

The bottled lava of his ever present need to defend Cobb reignites at her scowl.

He has no problem with people criticising Cobb’s methods as an Extractor. He’s had plenty of choice words for the man himself over the years, and not just once Mal was gone. He’s always been a bit of an uncompromising asshole.

What Arthur won’t stand for, though, what he _can’t_ stand for, is the implication that Cobb was responsible for Mal’s death. And it isn’t just loyalty to Dom, it’s loyalty to _Mal,_ too.

Rather, it’s the sheer impossibility that two people who loved each other as wholly as Mallorie Miles and Dominick Cobb did, that they could do something like that to each other.

Olivier’s still looking at him, a pitiful hound expression in her sleep bruised, freckly face.

“Limbo,” she says slowly, a descant of rural English vowels that he shouldn’t find quite so attractive, “is about the subconscious' free reign. They were one level in, and Eames was not in his own mind when he died. Whatever toxins were in the somnacin that sent him down, they will have blocked his ability to find his way back.

“He had already sacrificed the walls of his subconscious to make room for Bryony Wright. There would have been no safety nets to catch him, so when he dropped, he lost whatever control he might have been able to maintain otherwise.”

“I think Eames would resent your oversimplification of forgery,” Yusuf comments lightly, whistling through his teeth.

“What do you know about it?” a hostile voice snaps, grit dirty and toothless.

It takes the other two staring at him with identical expressions for Arthur to realise it was his own.

Yusuf gives him a testy smile. He’s still holding the clipboard containing all the unsecrets of Eames’ loosely tethered life.

“I know quite a bit, actually,” he says with that false snake charm of his. “Mixing somnacin takes more than knowing your BMI, or do you think I give each person their own mixtures just for the fun of it?”

Arthur can feel his insides trembling.

His breath catches talons in the back of his throat and he tosses the files back onto the desk. Folds his arms over his puffed, sunken chest and tries very hard not to look at Eames, expressionless and pale. Tries not to see the _eighty years_ written in Olivier’s red spiral scrawl that is now burned into his retinas.

He hadn’t considered, really, why Eames usually spent so long arguing with the chemists on jobs, had chalked it up to Eames being Eames, like the sun is bright and the sea is deep.

Before he can decide how to get away with not apologising, Yusuf’s stern exterior gives way to cinched professionalism.

“So, his militarisation’s through the roof? Could be a sign he isn’t totally-”

“Not exactly,” Olivier says, the acid green of her stare, the burn of it on Arthur’s face.

He walks out into the hallway without another word, agitation wreaking havoc on his frayed wire nerves.

He paces the hallway three times in long, pushing strides.

On the fourth turn, however, a nurse eyes him with red alert irritation.

He tries to return to the room, but one flashing glance of Olivier and Yusuf deep in conversation through the crosshatch porthole has him turning on his heel and looking instead across the hall to the opposing door.

Through an identical porthole, he can see a familiar face.

Arthur steps forward, his nose almost squashing against the tiny window.

Veronique is alone in her private room, the same blinking machines as Eames, the same lifeless expression on her olive skinned face.

He hasn’t seen her since Dubrovnik, the shouting match that left him hoarse, the twisted ankle and the two weeks lying low in a village that didn't even have a grocery stop.

He wonders how easily she took the job. If Eames knew she would be involved before saying yes.

He wonders what she thought of their plan, if she knew what she was getting herself into.

Arthur tries to clear his sandpaper throat. His brain feels syrupy, his limbs disembodied.

Behind him, abruptly, Olivier clears her throat.

Arthur doesn’t bother looking back.

“I didn’t realise she was here, too,” he says, to which Olivier makes a grunting sound of agreement.

She steps closer. He feels the heat of her, can smell her shampoo and her deodorant.

“Should we help her?” he asks, and feels grungy with almost-shame for asking.

Olivier _hmphs_ loudly.

“She sold me out to Magnar Raljinsson three years ago,” which says just about everything he needs to hear on the matter. Then, “I called Leon. He’ll swing by with his team when he can.”

It’s a token gesture at best, is surely not enough to wipe clean the stain of their blood-spotted indifference to her invisible suffering.

Finally, Arthur turns to look at Olivier, his exhaustion lining the mirror of her face.

She gives him a calculating look, one that speaks of ill news, of censure where apologies are long forgotten.

Down the hall, an orderly rattles by with an empty gurney.

“Arthur,” she says, the way others speak in languages they do not know, in curse words that are not their own. “The thing is…”

Her trailing silence is grating. It fidgets inside him, and he’d think she was doing it on purpose only she’s never looked at him like this before.

Insincerely, like a confession half designed.

“What?” he asks.

Olivier looks up and down the sterile corridor, blinking and breathing and being.

She says it in that same curse-word cursive,

“You’re down there.”

Arthur frowns, deep scores in his brow and his mouth arching open.

“What do you mean?”

“The first level, with a dead Bryony Wright,” she says, pitchy and paralysed. "There was a projection standing guard.”

Arthur’s heart, the thudding miracle of it, to be pieced together so carelessly and yet beat so terribly fast.

“It was you,” she clarifies needlessly.

Arthur’s soul, those knotted ribbons he gave up hope of ever untangling.

“You need to find a way to get past his security,” she says, which isn’t fair, not fair at all. Not to him and not to Eames, not even to her. “You might be the one he won’t listen to, Arthur. But you’re the only one he’ll hear.”

Lemon bitter, that irony in her down droop face. She’s upset, which is new.

She’s resigned to her dutiful pragmatism.

She would rather have a sane Eames at the success of somebody else than a comatose Eames at the prevailing of her own vanity.

Arthur bites his teeth together, dust crunch hard. His eyes are stinging and his lower lip bleeds into the straining curve under his tongue.

He should tell her.

For the first time, the confession comes to a pepper press point in his mouth, begging to be unleashed. He should tell her, she should know. She wouldn’t be doing this if she knew the truth.

He would have everything he ever deserved, absolution and damnation in the strike of her, this bronze avenging angel of dreams.

Then the moment passes, and her sadness gives way to a small, hopeful smile that won’t be shattered.

“Yusuf has an idea,” Olivier finishes, making to return to Eames’ room.

Arthur follows, hangdog autopilot on his feet, magnetised to the floor.

.

.

It’s a shitty fucking idea.

.

.

 _“I told you, you asshole,”_ Arthur bellows while the IV is still trapped in the thin crook of his waving arm. _“Two subjects has never worked! You could have destabilised whatever fraction of functionality he still has!”_

Yusuf’s expression is resolute, even though Olivier also looks a little disturbed as she catches her breath.

Her pupils are blown wide, and she’s gulping down air while gripping her own thighs in a sore attempt to mask her ill-recovered panic.

Adrenaline is pumping through Arthur, swallowing up his oxygen until he’s lightheaded.

It had been chaos down there.

Not only had Eames’ projections multiplied faster than their faces could form, merging and morphing in distorted imitations of Olivier’s own projections, but the environment, an easy familiar splash of rainy London, had quickly cracked under the strain of two minds sustaining its integrity.

Buildings had crumbled as quickly as they formed, and it was absolutely no coincidence, Arthur was sure, that he had been crushed by falling debris thirty seconds into the dream.

Yusuf, however, seems quite delighted with the update, jotting notes into his stupid red notepad and giving Arthur intrusive, pleased looks.

“Although,” Olivier interrupts Arthur’s tirade before it can gain decent momentum. Her voice is dry with heavy breaths. "You did last about twice as long this time.”

Arthur turns hise sneer to her instead.

“Oh _wonderful,”_ he snarls. “I’ll have an entire _half minute_ to find Eames, get to the second level of his subconscious and then - oh yes, that’s right, probably get shot in the face anyway.”

“Not necessarily,” Yusuf retorts.

Arthur stares bewildered at him. He can see Olivier doing the same, only with a disgustingly hopeful look on her face.

“How so?” she asks, realising Arthur is too stubborn to deign to.

Yusuf offers them a tricky look, his pen tapping against his teeth.

“If _Arthur_ is the second subject, his projections will probably be an extra layer of protection.”

There was a time when Arthur could handle being talked about like he wasn’t in the room.

Only, he had been six years old then, and stubborn enough to ignore his parents’ bickering.

“Or they’ll just be canon fodder,” he grumbles under his breath, pinching the bride of his nose between his thumb and knuckle.

“Well, yes,” Yusuf replies breezily. “Of course, the alternative is I just sedate you, and when Eames’ pitbulls kill you, you drop straight down into Limbo with him.”

Olivier lets out a crowlike laugh, harsh and quickly stifled.

Arthur, however, raises his eyebrows thoughtfully.

She must see his intrigue, because that laugh comes back, sharper this time.

“Fuck off, _Bentley,”_ Olivier says. “You’re not going to-”

“It could work, though.”

Olivier’s face pinks with frustration. She looks, very briefly, like Mal used to on those raincloud days, when progress was slow and tempers quick.

“Arthur, there’s a mighty fucking difference between going down after Eames and getting drop kicked into the event horizon.”

“I swear, you never used to be this dramatic,” Arthur drawls.

Olivier, her feather spitting mouth louder than the scratch of Yusuf’s pen in his red book.

“You could end up anywhere. It could take you _year_ _s-”_

Arthur cuts her off, her wilful face and her track mark arms.

He looks away from her to Yusuf, tucked on the computer chair by the desk.

“What happens if the sedative is still in effect and I die in Limbo?” he asks.

He slides the pinching needle out of his arm while Olivier lets out an exaggerated sigh that sounds a lot like _fuck me._

Yusuf’s eyes narrow up at him, considering.

“If it’s a strong enough sedative, it would kick you up to the first level and you’d either have to wait out the dream, or use a pre-agreed kick. If it’s light enough, it would wake you up.”

Arthur can feel the dancing tickle of jitters running through him. The excitement is glowing through him quicker than everything else.

“And how many light sedations could I take before permanently damaging something?”

Olivier’s face is hidden behind her hands. She mutters something incoherent in the same voice he once heard her use on Eames, when he was high as a kite on LSD after a misencounter with a mark.

“Are you asking me as a friend of yours, or a friend of Eames’?” Yusuf asks warily.

Arthur would like to point out Yusuf is technically a friend of neither of them. He understands the need for a distinction, though, and even as his heart triple beats in a flurry, a spot of blood oozing out of his elbow, he inclines his head.

“Both.”

Yusuf, wincing, then humming.

“If I was your friend, I would say five times. If I was Eames’ friend, I would say seven.”

Olivier’s glower over her hand is ferocious, yet she doesn’t protest.

Arthur nods, and his eyes drop to Eames’ hand, which is within grabbing distance on the bed.

There’s a deep silvery scar on the back of his palm, long healed and only noticeable when Eames remains still long enough for careful inspection, which is rare.

Arthur stares at it now, the way Eames has never really allowed him to before. He reaches with a careful hand and traces it, feels the dry scrape and curls his toes in his shoes.

He imagines it open and bleeding, then flinches.

“Seven?” he asks without looking away from the rough edge of that lacerated line.

“Seven,” Yusuf confirms with renewed confidence.

Arthur nods again. The room is very warm, and the sunshine pouring through the window is thicker today.

“How long before you can have everything ready?”

Yusuf glances at Olivier, who offers no objection, only hawk steel eyes and the weight of her silence.

“With a little help from some hospital supplies, an hour or so.”

“Do it,” Arthur says. “Ol, can you come under as a dreamer to the first level?”

She’s mirroring Eames’ face, now, that ugly boneless apathy.

“Of course,” she says dryly, and she's never sounded so much like Eames before. “I have zero qualms about losing my best Forger and my best Point Man in one fell swoop.”

“You don’t-”

“Scrambled eggs,” she says, liquor ice liquid in a voice made for demanding.

Arthur wonders if she thinks he’s being reckless on purpose.

.

.

Arthur wonders if he’s being reckless on purpose.

.

.

 _“Arthur, this is Eames, my Forger,”_ Olivier said, and Arthur bristled porcupine friendly at the possessive bite to it.

He held Eames’ unfriendly grey stare for as long as he could bear it, was forced to turn bashfully away to the redhead between them before all the wrong things could spill out his mouth.

Like,  _I’m sorry._   _Like,_   _Forgive me._

Like _I thought you died._

.

.

The sedative is ready in fifty-six minutes.

Arthur spends fifty-two of them staring at Eames’ notes from the job, his handwriting thin and graceful.

Beneath a list of eight year old Bryony’s history of doctor’s appointments - which would seem perfectly innocuous if not for the red pen underlining over half of them - is something else, written after and probably hastily, judging by the squashed curves of the scrawl.

_Liberace, 724 Malcolm-Wise_

Arthur runs a finger over the letters, written in heavier pen, urgent.

Then Olivier comes back in bearing bottles of water, an _actual fruit basket,_ and a stern expression.

“If you don’t come back, I will never forgive you,” she says.

“I know,” he replies.

.

.

“If you come back without him, I’ll kill you.”

“I know.”

.

.

The sedative to hand, Arthur sits on a chair close to the bed while Yusuf readies the PASIV.

He’s not quite looking at Arthur as he talks through the chemical equations one last time, but that’s ok, because Arthur not quite looking at anything except Eames’ closed eyes, either.

Olivier is on the other side of the bed, her thumb tapping against her wrist. Otherwise, she’s calm. Resolved.

Arthur doesn’t know what dream she’s taking them into.

Not that it matters, not when this time he doesn’t have to even try to survive it,

“Are you ready?” Yusuf asks, and Arthur doesn’t hear his own reply.

He feels it, though, feels it claw its way out of his throat.

He does hear the thready hum of the PASIV, feels the cool skin of Eames’ forearm under his hand.

They sink into it, like the ink of the sea in night’s throes.

.

.

(The first time Eames’ subconscious rips Arthur apart, his heart breaks, even though he immunised himself against that virus long ago.)

.

.

Arthur opens his eyes, dazzle soft light and the crackle of an open fire.

It’s a living room, smells of coal and soft fabrics and pine.

He sees Olivier, her pained face unfathomable.

“What-” he starts, even as his eyes catch sight of the shallow yellow of gold hair. A girl, lying dead on the carpet, soaked in scarlet.

Older than eight, though, those pigtails loose at her shoulders, sodden red over her slashed throat.

A bullet shreds through the back of his head. He feels it before he goes down.

.

.

He drops, and then, he _drops._

.

.


	4. the girl with the blonde pigtails

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dearest darlings,
> 
> So, forgive me. I totally failed my linear story plan. In my defense, writing linear in Limbo seems like an exercise in futility. I promise I tried! I've written at least six variations of this chapter. Seriously, my Google Docs has crashed multiple times trying to get this done.
> 
> icarusinflight, FreightTrainInMyBrain, SilverUkiss - thanks for the lovely comments! Your thoughts keep me inspired and I am very grateful. I hope this brings you some sort of satisfaction. 
> 
> I've basically given you three chapters of exposition, I know. If you've stuck with me, I really appreciate it. It seems I've waited to pack literally all of the action into the final episode, so here's your reward for sticking with me, I guess!
> 
> Please note - there are a lot of allusions to violence against a child and young adult here. While it is all in a dream, it is implied to be representing reality to some degree, so do bear that in mind if you're upset by that sort of thing.(I'd hope anyone is upset by it, but you know what I mean.)
> 
> I also end things kind of, well. Not ambiguous. But I'm being deliberately unhelpful. There will be a follow up!
> 
> Again, my thanks. I have plenty more stories planned for this series, so do keep an eye out for more if you liked this! (Ooh, and also leave a review if you like. That is always immensely appreciated.)
> 
> Love love more love,  
> LRCx

.

.

They sit on the grassy embankment, staring down at the huge white house.

Clean Georgian lines and an impassive, sunlight glare face.

Arthur’s wearing an Oxford University sweater and jeans. Olivier’s wearing shorts and a Metallica t-shirt.

The sun presses upon the burning crowns of their heads and they lean back on their hands, watching from a distance.

“So, he’s definitely in there?” she asks, sounding purposefully disbelieving.

Arthur doesn’t rise to it.

“Even when I can’t see him, I can still hear him,” he says again, calm and determined. “I just can’t find him.”

“Has he heard you?”

“I don’t think so.”

She looks at him, doesn’t voice whatever thoughts are making her purse her lips like that.

“His projections?” she asks even though she knows, she _knows._

“Hardly any. But they're the literal death of me, every time,” he replies with a long-suffering sigh.

Olivier laughs, just to fill the space, before the terror can creep in.

.

.

They might not make it.

.

.

It starts simple enough.

.

.

When it starts, Arthur goes down alone.

He lands on hard ground, shin splints and jarred knees.

His head cloudy and his nose sharp with the scent of tree sap and pine, he opens his eyes to a white blaze of sunshine.

Blinks, shielding his eyes with one hand.

He’s standing is some sort of clearing. The sun is directly above him, leaving him eerily shadowless, and as he turns he realises he’s landed in the centre of a perfect circle of trees, impenetrably dense all around him.

The grass underfoot is yellow, crunching as he swivels around and on his second turn, he sees something. Something that wasn’t there before, something that has, perhaps, been conjured by his arrival.

 _Someone,_ rather.

Bryony Wright looks dazed, sweating in the heat and shivering in her school sweater, which has a gold and black logo sewn over her heart.

Her blonde hair is pulled painfully tight into pigtails. Her cherub soft face is solemn as she stares at him.

Arthur takes a very quiet breath.

There doesn’t seem to be anyone else around them, but a dream doesn’t need projections to be deadly.

 _Remember, this is your subconscious, too,_ Yusuf had said.

This doesn’t feel much like a welcome place for Arthur, though.

The forestry is familiar, but this little girl, her mouth is set so clown frown sad and her funeral stare isn’t averting. A pretty guard dog, and while her bite probably isn’t deep, Arthur has no doubt that her bark is loud.

Too afraid to disturb whatever unholy peace resides in this crop circle safety, Arthur waits.

The minutes elongate, timeless. Birds sing and crickets call and the wind curls and Bryony Wright shivers, heatstroke flushing her face and Arthur’s, too.

When he finally dares break eye contact, it’s to look down at himself. He’s wearing his old military casuals, that irrepressible shade of green that stands out horribly amidst the sickly yellow ground and lush depth of the trees.

_“What’s that?”_

Arthur flinches as Bryony’s high, clearwater voice breaks their stalemate.

He looks up to see her gesturing behind him.

Over his shoulder, an object has appeared.

A chair, made of rich, dark reddish looking wood. It’s beautifully carved, would not be out of place in a Georgian Manor.

Except, tangled around its arms are weighty iron chains and it’s bolted at the legs into the ground with huge, steeltrap plates. Menacingly man-made in this place of wind-kissed nature.

Arthur has a cold feeling of dread in his stomach.

 _This is your subconscious, too,_ Yusuf said and Arthur, he might not like it, but this is quite possibly the first part of him to invade Eames’ world down here. Of all the things for his subconscious to hurl at him.

“What is it?” Bryony asks again, reedy fear and panicking.

When Arthur looks back at her, she’s crying.

Her sobs hitch loudly in the air, fat tears rolling out of bruised eyes down her cheeks.

“It’s ok,” he says, reaching with both hands and stepping forwards.

However, when his foot hits the ground, the crunch of grass is accompanied by the crack of a gun and a vicious, burning pain in the back of his shoulder.

“God _damnit_ Eames!” Arthur roars in pain, his hand flying to his injured shoulder.

The bullet has gone clean through, leaving a bloody mess on both sides.

Breathing hard through his nose, Arthur grits his teeth and tries to regain control of his taut arm, tries to squash the pain down further into his subconscious, letting out a futile laugh. Blood leaks through his tank shirt in oozing throbs. Sweat pours down his face.

Bryony’s stopped crying.

She’s staring wide eyed, horrified, her mouth gaping open.

“You’ll catch flies,” he grunts with a tight unsmile.

With childlike horror, Bryony clamps her mouth shut. Her grey eyes remain golf ball round.

Arthur frowns.

Her face is an exact replica of the one he’d found in all the articles about her terrible end, down to the skewed gap in her front teeth now hidden behind her tightly closed lips. She the right height, the right size, even looks to be the right weight.

And yet, the Bryony from her school photograph had most definitely had brown eyes.

A soft, cocoa shade of curiosity, very close to her grandfather’s.

Arthur studies her face, her lips now obstinately tucked over her teeth.

Her brow is creased and there are two bruises darkening like sunset shadows, one under each eye, as if someone had dared punch this lovely little girl right between them.

Arthur starts to take another step towards her. The pain in his shoulder deepens instantly, almost as if warning him, and he stops. Twisting about him, he tries to spot some sign of a shooter.

The trees seem, if possible, even closer knit than before.

Carefully, holding his breath, he lifts his foot and this time, takes a step back, away from Bryony.

Nothing.

On a shaky exhale, Arthur nods to himself. Bryony’s glittering eyes track him mutely.

“Eames?” Arthur asks the girl.

She blinks, showing no sign of recognition.

“Eames, is that you?”

Arthur had been completely certain that Eames wouldn’t retain the forge down here, that his subconscious would find a way out of her, even if he couldn’t make it all the way out of Limbo.

Perhaps not, though. Perhaps he’s been stuck here all this time, Goldilocks without a house of bears to shelter her.

The shape of Bryony Wright, shivering and silent, stares past Arthur, towards the chair with the chains.

Arthur turns to follow her gaze, and finds himself looking at another Bryony.

Or, not another Bryony. Another girl entirely.

She’s blonde, too. Her hair is bunched into pigtails as well, although they’ve come loose and are sticking in thin clumps to her sweaty red cheeks.

She’s sitting perfectly still, wearing a different uniform; two black eyes and a bloody nose. She might be sixteen, it’s hard to tell.

Her face is tilted downwards, her chin almost touching her chest. Her fingers are gripping the chains, looped through the links like rings.

“Eames?” he tries again. The nameless girl flinches.

Arthur takes a step forward without thinking, wincing and ducking violently in anticipation.

No shots are fired, though. All is clear.

Emboldened, head tucked a little in precaution, Arthur tries again.

While the girl sinks further into her seat, nothing else happens.

Relief powering him, Arthur takes the last few steps towards her, until he can kneel in front of her, not quite daring to touch her. The shrivelled grass blades bite into his knees through his cargo pants.

“Eames, is that you?” he asks.

The older girl tilts her head up, just enough to meet his gaze. Her eyes, so grey they are almost violet.

Arthur reaches to cup her chin, the way he did to his little sister when she cried, long ago, when he was a big brother. The girl’s tears slide down to his hand. Her bottom lip, smeared with dark blood, wobbling.

It’s too fast to stop. She moves with lightning speed.

One hand snaps to his throat and the other cuts upwards in a surprisingly strong jab.

The knife glides straight up, up behind his ribcage through his flesh like hot butter, piercing a lung. Arthur gasps, air cut off by her crushing grip.

Her mouth is a snarl of vengeance.

“You had no right,” she growls as blood seeps over her wrist out of his chest.

Arthur scrambles at her hands but dizzy spots are already dancing his vision in a twirl of lights and darks.

He can feel her face close to his ear as life pulses out of him in a waterfall rush.

“Tell her,” she whispers, a hushing threat. “Tell her you had no right.”

She lets go and the knife slides free of his body. Arthur crumples to the ground in a twisted sprawl.

For a few seconds, he can see Bryony Wright’s tear stricken face as she’s gathered into the older girl’s bloodstained arms.

His eyelids flutter in a shudder of bloodless rage.

.

.

He wakes up.

.

.

It’s a slow awakening, a sluggish disorientation, at such odds with the fast violence of what came before that for a moment he almost thinks he’s still asleep.

His hand is clenched around his totem, though, and the other is so tight around Eames’ lax forearm there’ll be bruises for sure.

He opens his eyes and instantly hears Yusuf let out a curse.

“Arthur?” he says and there are two fingers on his throat, checking his pulse.

“How long was I out?” he asks, but the words jumble up in his mouth.

The fretting chemist seems to understand anyway.

“Barely,” he says, sounding anxious. “A minute and a half, almost.”

“Again,” he replies, his eyes on Olivier, who’s still slumped in her chair, no doubt waiting on the first level for him to return.

“Arthur-”

“Again,” he says, an order this time.

Yusuf obeys.

The chemical slump hits Arthur before he can unclench his bruising grip on Eames’ arm.

.

.

“What about Bryony Wright?”

Olivier lies back on the grass, sponge soaking the sunshine, her fingers knotting in the long grass.

“Locked in a room on the second floor,” Arthur says. “I’ve let her out twice.”

Olivier’s eyes are closed, her freckles darker than usual.

Even from this distance, the crashing rattle coming from inside the house is faintly audible.

Arthur fiddles with the sleeve ends of his sweater, frayed, bloodied.

“Does he know he’s dreaming?” she asks.

Arthur stares down at the house. Its face is greying, the paint peeling, licked off by invisible storms.

“I don’t think he cares.”

.

.

First level, copper and death.

Olivier’s ferret glare, pointed, that downturn of disaffection.

It’s only when he sees her glum green eyes that he remembers what the girl had said.

 _Tell her,_ she’d whispered, the maybe-Eames had whispered. _You had no right._

But had that meant _Arthur_ had no right, or Olivier? Or both?

This time, though, Olivier doesn’t even wait for Eames’ subconscious to do the dirty work.

She raises the gun herself and shoots him in the forehead.

He drops. That stomach swoop guts him like he’s drowning.

.

.

The smell of trees is back, the sunlight burning even hotter.

He knows even before he opens his eyes, he’s in the same clearing as before.

This time he waits longer before opening them. Tries to hear everything first, the birds and the crickets and the branches.

Slowly, he opens his eyes. A flashing sight of gold hair and he turns away immediately.

Maybe, just maybe, if he doesn’t engage with her, she won’t engage with him.

 _“What’s that?”_ Bryony Wright asks, unprompted.

Arthur doesn’t acknowledge her.

He stares at the trees instead, the dense thickets surrounding them. As his eyes adjust to the washout of the sun, he realises he’s staring at a sliver of darkness between the green.

A path, or at the very least a gap through their pine needle armour.

Boldly, he takes a step towards it.

Just as he thought would happen, no shot comes his way.

The ground doesn’t swallow him up and Zeus’ wrath doesn’t strike him from above.

The key, he deduces as he walks in a straight line towards the trees, is to _not engage._

Maybe, just maybe, this unman’s land is negotiable, or at the very least survivable.

His confidence renewed, Arthur reaches the tree line and sees the gap runs straight through. A path.

He steps into the shadows and the escape from the skin-cracking, desert-worthy sun is like a cold kiss to a fever.

Arthur sighs an involuntary echo of relief, his shoulders relaxing.

He’s in his military gear again, which while not his first choice is at the very least familiar. The smell of the trees is much heavier here, invading his throat like fumes.

Arthur picks his way through the ferns and branches, leafy fingertips scraping him a little too eagerly.

Sheltered from the sun and no longer at risk of being confronted by Bryony Wright’s tears, he thinks about how exactly he’s going to get through to Eames when his only rule seems to be _don’t talk to anyone._

The shadows loom over him, seem to reach right through him.

He’s somewhat surprised by the vast stretch of nature that has filled Eames’ subconscious.

Eames has always shown a preference for cities, the busier the better. It seems odd that his mind, when retreating to basic instinct, would surround him in the cupped palm of Mother Nature.

If anything, this feels more like the sort of place Arthur’s mind would create for solace.

At this alarming thought, Arthur stops walking.

Without the soft brushing tread of his footsteps, his breaths feel louder in the tender air.

 _Is_ this Eames’ subconscious? Surely it is, what with the spectral presence of Bryony Wright and the other girl, not to mention the unwarranted violence against Arthur’s person.

Yet why is he here, and not in a sprawling labyrinth of London or Mombasa or Bangkok?

 _This is your subconscious, too,_ Yusuf said, and is it so rapid, down here? Is Limbo so potent that all Arthur has to do is show up and the landscape will bend to his mind?

For the first time in his life, Arthur wishes he’d asked Cobb more about what Limbo had been like for him and Mal. What laws he’d abided by, what laws he’d broken.

Above his head, the trees whisper their secrets to each other.

Arthur peers between their ragged limbs and sees only gloomy shade.

“Why are you here?” he asks, unsure if he’s talking to Eames or to himself.

He can’t help but worry that if Eames’ subconscious is so unlike himself, then Eames is surely not going to _be_ himself when Arthur finds him.

As if voicing some measure of his fear had helped, Arthur is suddenly very aware of a faint rattling sound, vastly unnatural amidst the tremoring of trees, echoing in the badger setts.

On quick feet, Arthur follows the sound, wading through the bending branches, accumulating whip-thin scratches as he goes, whittling to needles over his bare arms.

The rattling grows louder, and the path seems to slope downwards, pulling at his aching shins.

The trees are thinner here, their bodies shorter and their leaves lighter, deciduous and soft.

He comes to the outskirts unexpectedly, the air rushing hot gold sun in a flash.

Arthur stops short, just before he leaves the shade.

Beyond, there stretches outwards huge rolling plains of wheat and long grass.

There’s a house. It’s a huge block of white, windowless at the face and even from this distance, Arthur can see a heavy door in the centre of the front wall.

The light bouncing off its sheer surface so brilliantly, he cannot tell if it is wood or stone. It looks old, worn and weary.

He stares down at it, wondering if that is where the metallic clanging is coming from. It reminds him a little of his grandmother’s old farmhouse, where he would go every summer, no matter where they were living at the time.

He remembers begging his mother to let him stay there, not to get dragged to yet another army base.

His grandmother’s farm had been the only stability in his childhood, and he’d adored it. Even though now as an adult, he’s done nothing but uproot himself time and again, his father’s son through and through.

It’s the wrong colour _and_ the wrong shape, yet it _feels_ right, the way dreams always do. Without meaning to, Arthur finds his feet drifting him down to its sheer windowless face.

It beckons to him and he is powerless against its yearning pull. His pace picks up, like the skid of a slope though the ground is almost entirely even.

The blades of grass tickle up to his knees as he runs, runs towards the home that is almost his.

Elation fills him, floods him.

A laugh of glee bursts out of him  and the wind chafes his sweaty cheeks. There’s a thudding in his head as the rattling from inside the house grows desperately loud.

He’s squinting and flailing and running hard to home; the very air embraces him. He can taste it, rapeseed and oranges, the sand of a California beach.

Arthur runs and runs and the door ahead is opening even as he approaches.

He opens his mouth ready to shout out, shout to his grandmother and his father, to Bryony Wright and to Eames, he’s _home,_ he’s _here,_ he’s _ready_ now -

The slam of the door shutting back is deafening, it echoes cavernous through the scorching sky and Arthur has no time to slow his tracks, he runs straight into the solid oak door, hard as broken bones.

It winds him, a great _oof_ of air and he staggers back. Breathlessly his hands drop to his knees, head bowed and he lets out a despairing gloom of _No, no, no!_

The clanging rattle has stopped. Like a beacon fulfilled of duty, the sound is now silence as if swallowed down by the slammed mouth of the front door.

Arthur stares around him, dead vegetable patches and scuff marks in the dirt.

He steps to the door, and pushes his ear to it, listening.

Footsteps, dampened by the wood, but there, very much there. Someone is inside, pacing the hall.

Heart quick, Arthur presses his lips to the wood and says, none too quiet a kiss of vowels,

“Eames?”

The pacing doesn’t falter. A surge of need runs through Arthur like a knife. His knees feel weak, his forehead cold over the wood.

 _“What are you doing here?”_ a warm, catlike voice asks. A woman’s, a tone of sensuality so close to Olivier’s when she’s being charming that Arthur turns whipcrack fast around in surprise.

It isn’t Olivier. The woman has black hair, ringlets falling over a pair of electric blue eyes.

She’s dressed in a polkadot sundress, pins in her hair sparkling diamond bright.

She cocks her head playfully, hands on her waist. Arthur thinks it makes a disturbing amount of sense that Eames’ head is full of wraithlike, terrifying women.

“What are you doing here?” the woman asks again.

“Who are you?” he asks, voice a croak of disappointment.

The woman’s finely painted brow arches high in her forehead.

“I’m the first one,” she says obtusely, pursing her scarlet lips.

She holds herself with an elegant pride, a posing peacock curve of enjoyment, sunning herself, her pale naked arms and legs, her bare feet dusty.

“The first what?” he asks, and even as he voices it, he hears the cracking doubt in the ground beneath his feet.

The woman’s cavernous mouth, her lightning bolt eyes.

An earthquake, grumbling underfoot. He can feel it in his sternum, like a boiler in a basement gone wild.

An upkick of dust scatters around him like a swarm. It clogs his throat, his eyes. He claws at his face and his knees give out.

The woman is delighted, a bubble of laughter that rises above the cloud of the earth pulled up by Arthur’s unwelcome intrusion. He chokes and stumbles back, back into the heavy door that had refused his entry.

It falls away, matchsticks and glue, and the entire front of the house cries out in fear.

Arthur lets out a gasp, nothing more, and the pit of the doorway swallows him whole in a wrecking shred of stone.

.

.

He wakes up.

.

.

From the embankment, they can see the windows of the house rattling.

There’s a deep crack in the porch, the crevasse a rotting moat, widening and wailing.

Slowly, they creep down the grass, inch by shuffling inch. Unnerved and unarmed.

.

.

The second time is sudden. Wakefulness seizes him like a spell and he scrambles up, half out of his chair before the drugs pull him back down into it.

He takes a breath in that won’t come out again, another and another.

He can feel Yusuf close by, hear his voice, and Olivier’s, too. His hands swat out around him and he thinks he catches someone’s jaw. He gulps in air until he’s sure he’ll burst, until he’s swollen with oxygen and his eyes shut tight are blind with fear.

A hand on his shoulder, another around a wrist.

A woman’s voice, different, stretched soft around bent vowels.

“That’s it, that’s it, you’re ok. You’re ok now. You’re here. You’re awake. You’re with us. You’re here.”

Misremembered lyrics to an ill favoured song.

Arthur wipes sweat from his upper lip with the back of his fist, still clenched punishingly around his totem.

“I need - I need -” he tries and without any further explanation required both of them back away. Yusuf to the PASIV and Olivier to Eames.

Arthur bends double over his lap, until his face is between his shins and his hands are almost touching the floor.

With the slightest lift of his hand, he opens his raw fingers and drops the die.

It bounces once, landing on three. He does it again, and a third time for good measure.

Scoops it up into his palm and wraps his fingers back around it, talisman tight.

“We need to break,” Olivier says from somewhere on the other side of the bed.

Arthur shakes his head, rubbing the sweat from his temple.

“Again,” he says.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Olivier snaps and even as Arthur tries to protest, she’s shoving an open bottle of water into his hand.

He takes a measured sip to please her. When she tries to refuse taking it back, he simply puts it down next to his chair, where he hopes he won’t kick it over next time he wakes up.

“Have you even found him yet?” she asks, full of disbelief that he wishes so desperately he could prove wrong.

He shakes his head again.

“That’s why I have to go back,” he says hoarsely. “There’s no time.”

Olivier doesn’t voice the irony dancing in her eyes. It rankles him anyway, like a joke pushed an inch too far.

“I’ll take you down-”

“No,” Arthur says, and this time when he shakes his head he feels a blip of nausea. He swallows that down, too. “No, it’s ok. You don’t need to.”

Olivier tilts her head in a pitying, doleful motion.

“Arthur,” she says, the same way Eames does sometimes, and it flares at the scars inside Arthur.

He reaches back to hold Eames’ forearm, where five blue blotches have appeared exactly beneath his fingers.

Yusuf twists his lips at his nod, even as he reaches for the PASIV.

“I’ll call your friend Cobb,” Olivier warns, an empty threat.

Arthur scoffs, and doesn’t take his eyes off Eames’ face, pale against the sheets, scruff on his jaw that Arthur would criticise if it was on purpose.

“I don’t answer to Dominick Cobb,” he says, even as sleep devours him as quickly as it spat him out.

.

.

Halfway down the grasses, Olivier seizes his arm. He has bruises from her fingertips.

Her eyes burn with fire that would set snow alight.

.

.

The first level, copper and death.

There’s no Olivier this time, and for a second he thinks there’s no dead girl, either.

He stares around the living room, the soaked bloodstains and the dirt on the carpet.

From behind the sofa, the hide and seek giveaway. A trailing clump of blonde hair.

This time, though, nothing happens. Arthur stares about the creme walls and the muddied floor and nothing happens. No shot is fired, no wail of rejection. He’s alone in Eames’ subconscious and breathing clean air.

The loneliness is insatiable, eating into his bones. There’s a gun in his hand.

He cocks it. Before he can raise the barrel higher than his waist, somebody else fires first.

He drops and he hears it, the sigh of life out of his body.

Or maybe that’s somebody else, too.

.

.

 _Where's his_   _totem?_ Olivier asked and Arthur shrugged and whispered  _Fucking hell._

.

.

The house casts a deep indigo shadow over him, a swallowing shade that feels colder than it should. He can see the heat rising out of the ground from afar but here, tucked against the wall of the house, he’s shivering.

His back is pressed against a smooth, chilled surface. Smoother than wood, certainly glossier than stone.

Arthur steps away from it, turns around and finds himself looking at a wide window, the glass tinted to the shade of secrets.

He puts a hand to it, pulls away and watches the heat marks fade in a foggy heartbeat.

Then he leans into the glass, both hands cupped over his eyes and peers through the dark glaze.

It looks like a kitchen of some kind, all smooth lines and the dull shine of chrome and tile.

His breath quickly fogs up the window and he wipes it with his arm, bunching up the sleeve of his shirt and swiping it across the glass.

Surprised, he takes himself in. He’s shed the military gear and is instead wearing a soft white shirt, compete with belt buckled trousers. There’s something uniform to it, the stark white of the top half and the sheer black black of the bottom.

Arthur runs his hands over his head and feels a very faint tack of gel keeping his hair under feeble control.

Then he sees the cufflinks on his sleeves. They’re disproportionately large, square and amber. There’s something angry about them, like two lion’s eyes staring out of his wrists.

This, he realises, is what he wore to his grandmother’s funeral, or close enough. His father had put the cufflinks on him, his mouth a tired line of unrecognisable grief.

He’d been seven, or was it seventeen? Arthur closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

Fifteen. He’d been fifteen years old when his grandmother died, when they’d sold the farmhouse and he’d stolen a photograph from her cabinet that he’d thought was of his father, but it turns out was his uncle.

Arthur reaches into the pocket of his trousers and pulls out a familiar red die. He rolls it in his hands, bouncing it lightly in his palm.

When his hand tips sideways, it lands on the dusty ground silently, unnaturally heavy.

Eight ladybird spots stare up at him and he smiles, picking it up and slipping it back into his pocket for safekeeping.

Behind him, he can hear the edge of the forest buzzing. Along the wall of the house’s shadow, glass and white and door.

Open door.

Arthur freezes, feels his stomach clench with his toes and his fists. Over his shoulder, there is only a dead garden and beyond it, vast lands eaten up by trees.

When he looks back, the door is still open.

He holds his breath inside him like a talisman, edging towards the door and keeping as close to the wall as he can while he does it.

It’s been a long time since Arthur felt quite so much like prey, but this is a land of predators and he feels terribly ill-equipped to survive.

 _If I was your friend, I would say five times,_ Yusuf had said.

He’s already wasted two of his precious chances. If he doesn’t get it right this time, he’ll be more than halfway done.

Halfway _safely_ done, that is.

_If I was Eames’ friend, I would say seven._

Yusuf, Arthur thinks, isn’t really anybody’s friend. On the other hand, if he had to choose, Arthur has no doubt that Yusuf would choose Eames.

 _So would Olivier,_ a quiet silky voice reminds him.

Then again, sometimes, so would Arthur.

This thought is more of a surprise than he thinks it should be.

The door is still open, Arthur toeing closer to it on the balls of his feets, heels rocking against the wall as he sidles along. Closer, closer. Almost…

Arthur also shouldn’t be surprised by the majestic dual staircase that greets him through the open doorway.

Nonetheless, he is surprised. It’s the surprise that emboldens him, or maybe stupefies him. He stepped casually over the threshold as easily as if this were his own dream.

Everything is grand, here. Despite the white block casing of sleek modernism in action, the inside of the house is palatial. It’s the kind of place Arthur conjures in his head when he imagines Eames’ childhood, which he does exceedingly rarely.

(He has though, of course he has. Eames is a ghost and most of what Arthur knows about him, he pulled out of his mouth as forcefully as the roots of his teeth. So of course he’s imagined it.)

The stairs are dark wood, the banisters to match. The floor is freshly stained with varnish, the tang of paint and polish still lingering in the air.

Beneath his feet is a rumbling murmur of ageing pipes. Maybe a boiler in need of attention.

To his left is a door that seems to lead under one set of stairs. Leads down, no doubt, to a basement.

There was a gallery, one, somewhere. London or New York or Berlin.

A painting of shapes in shades that Arthur could not fully unpick.

 _Isn’t it peaceful?_ Eames had said, and lucky for Arthur he hadn’t needed an answer, because all Arthur could think was, _This looks nothing like a house._

This looks exactly like a house. In fact, it looks too much like a house.

Arthur doesn’t need to have spent time in Eames’ head recently to know that Eames’ houses don’t look like houses.

 _You would be a terrible Architect,_ he told Eames once, when Eames complained about the lack of skylights in the underground tunnels.

Arthur walks through the house, fingertips scraping over the showroom walls, noiseless on the plush creme living room carpet.

There’s an actual drawing room, of course, with about twelve vases of flowers, their silky petals glowing with colour.

On the wall, a portrait of a man and a woman and a girl who could only be their daughter.

Arthur looks at the girl, her plaited blonde hair and violet grey eyes.

He feels the phantom stab of her knife in his gut. He searches the painting for some clue, maybe in the gilded frame or the corner signature.

There’s nothing.

No hint of who she is, or why she’s important to Eames, no empty space in the portrait where maybe the boy Eames once was, or should be.

The man and woman are stately stern, the girl demure the way all girls seem to be when they are oil on canvas, as if the artist has achieved what they themselves, living breathing creatures of imperfection, could not.

Arthur prowls this grand house in eerie silence that swallows him, and it’s only back in the hallway he can hear that groaning pipe rattle.

There are demons in this house.

And, he realises, an endless supply of sunshine. For hours the sun has spilled back and forth across the windows, as if untethered from Helios’ guiding chariot.

There are footsteps, too. Arthur can feel the vibration of them, a restless skulking that eats through the air like a draft.

There are no drafts in this house, only an ill-fated boiler and the dust of a lonely ghost.

The stairs loom up, ceiling bound, and Arthur’s mostly certain.

A sound shrieks through the air, cutting in half the boiler’s throbbing bass. The soprano searing of glass shattering.

Arthur whips around, his nerves fired with alarm. The sound had come from the left side of the house.

His fingertips scrape over the walls as he hurries towards it. There’s a door and he shoves it open, hard. Stares down a long winding staircase. Stone grey, cut corners.

He’s breathless.

Glass crunches at the bottom underfoot, but what feet, he can’t see.

It would be so easy, he thinks, to embed himself into these walls. Paint himself onto the plaster as a mural of malcontent.

This house that stands in solemnity and pride, with hungry churning innards and a face of sunbeam stains.

The stairs stretch down before him and he hears the footsteps behind him, breathes a name he shouldn’t know.

Something pierces him throat, gushing slice of scarlet, crippling his words and his worry.

It sprays across the walls and whatever was shoved into his neck, it stays there as his knees break the floor beneath him.

He thinks it might be glass.

.

.

"I'm coming too," Olivier says with a steely look in her eyes that frightens him almost as much as it soothes him.

She is a pitbull, and she is a swan, and she is the avenging angel that Arthur thinks, maybe, neither of them deserve.

.

.

Dropping into Eames’ head, it feels the same as it did six years ago, when Eames wasn’t Eames and Arthur wasn’t Arthur.

When tears sparkled crimson on Eames’ cheeks and he shook his head over and over, until his concussion brought up his stomach lining and his crying made Arthur’s fingernails scoop the flesh out of his own palms.

Olivier’s faith in him, which has always been a storm’s anchor, feels like more bedrock in shallow waters, now.

.

.

On the grass as they make the final descent, Arthur turns to Olivier and says,

“There’s something you need to know.”

.

.

When Arthur finds Eames, there’s no relief. No gasping end of suffering, a kissing sigh of triumph.

There is bafflement, and then, Arthur dies.

(Then, Arthur wakes up.)

.

.

When Arthur finds Eames, it’s almost an accident.

.

.

The house swallows him up.

Olivier stands guard outside, chain smoking cigarette that smell of burnt coffee.

There’s a new sound coming from the upper floors. A repetitive thudding, marked couplets followed by an intake breath pause. A ball being bounced, thud-thud, floor-wall, and back again.

Arthur follows the sound on graceful, silent feet. He’s learning this house day by day, dream by dream. Which floorboards creak and which doors slam.

He runs his fingers over the paint grit walls, skims the frames of blurry photos and abstract paintings.

The third floor, with its low ceilings and soft orange lights. The bounce-bang is louder, there’s an open door halfway down.

Inside, the sound is loud, only, there’s no ball, no person. Just a trapeze, swinging from the joists, as if recently leapt from.

Arthur turns back, hears footsteps and moves towards them, to a closed white door with a heavy brass handle.

Readiness seizes him, an innate, instinctual slice of knowledge that rises through him, as crippling as fear and as steadying as hope.

Eames is behind this door.

He knows it, can feel his presence and victory, it’s so close Arthur can taste it, like cologne on Eames’ neck when they’re out of time but they have another round anyway.

Arthur reaches for the handle, sees his hand trembling and grasps it tight to make it stop. The turn in the door is stiff, a series of beetle clicks.

With a tremor of a push, the door opens. Arthur’s heart is weighing down his tongue, stone and steel.

He sees him, the rough shape of a starved out shell. He’s _here,_ right _here,_ tangible and touchable and –

Arthur freezes where he stands, all the breath stolen from his vacuous lungs.

The man standing in the room, this lilac and maroon splash of _bed_ and _window_ and _cabinets,_ it isn’t Eames.

Only, it _is_ Eames, Arthur can still feel it, like electricity in the air, like a hand over a flame. He can smell Eames’ cologne and sense his presence like a predator among thickets.

But it’s like staring into an unkind mirror, to look at this man.

He’s wearing Arthur’s face.

Eames, he isn’t Eames and he isn’t Bryony Wright and he isn’t that sharp bladed teenager either.

He’s _Arthur._ An older Arthur, with frown lines and ever so slight speckles of grey in his hair.

Eames, he’s staring back at Arthur with a kind of existential agony that might have been comical if Arthur could stomach it. Only he can’t.

This Eames-Arthur, he lifts a gun, cocks it right in Arthur’s face and Arthur’s hands fly up in cautious surrender.

His words are scrambled, he can’t think, he can’t breathe.

That bouncing ball tremor is ringing in his head and Eames-Arthur, in a voice of mellow terror, he asks,

“Why are you here?”

And Arthur hears it, feels it,t the sound of his own voice, syllable rhythm perfect to match his cadences.

Before he can swallow down that hurting sadness, Arthur opens his mouth, eye-itching regret, he says,

“Eames, it’s me.”

Eames shoots him, gut first, a vindictive punch that smashes right through Arthur’s ferocious denial,. Before he can say anything more, Eames shoots him again, barrel trained between Arthur’s eyes.

.

.

Arthur wakes up, breath like sea water, and screams.

.

.

He doesn’t know how many dreams he has coasted anymore, how many times he has sunk reckless into the good twilight of nothingness.

Has he woken up at all?

.

.

Yusuf’s hands on his wrists, Olivier’s voice in his ears.

(It wasn’t a bouncing ball, wasn’t a _thud-thud_ at all. It was the _clatter-smack_ of a die being rolled, over and over. Answerless questions and desperation unmentionable.)

.

.

“He’s not, he isn’t _Eames,_ down there,” he says, glass gasp of shock.

Yusuf doesn’t seem surprised by this and neither does Olivier. And yes, fair enough, they thought he might be half a forge of forgetfulness.

Not _this_ though.

“Is he still Bryony Wright?” Olivier asks, anxiety and anger.

Arthur shakes his head, gripping the glass of water weakly in both hands, embarrassed to realise Yusuf is still holding it, too, just in case.

He looks at Olivier, where she’s kneeling in front of him.

The ring on her finger pale and silver. It's always been a prop in his imagination. He wonders, for the first time, if maybe she actually _is_ married.

“Who is he, Arthur?” she asks with lullaby kindness, sounds like fields and farms.

It chokes him, mute like a confessional booth.

“He’s _me,”_ he says, divine and desolate. “He’s _me,_ he’s wearing m-my face.”

Hot tears in his eyes that he dries away before they can fall. He’s ashamed and he’s needy and he hates the way there’s some sick kind of pleasure rumbling in his chest, cat-purr-proud.

Like it means something, like maybe it’s some sort of proof that Olivier might have been the name on Eames’ medical list, but _Arthur’s_ the one he remembers when his mind is in disarray.

Arthur’s never thought of himself as narcissistic, never realised he carries such an ugly measure of ego inside him.

But Olivier, she looks at him with a relaxed, gentle face. She looks, if anything, _relieved._

“Well, he’s completely in love with you,” she says with a shrug, breaking every rule they have ever put down with such blatant disregard it jars him.

It’s not for her to say, for her to notice. Not when Arthur’s been rejecting that love over and over again for years, so wrapped up in his self-pity there’s no room for that sick adoration Eames reserves for him.

 _I never stopped loved you,_ he said and Arthur, he threw it back in his face with those mean, scathing words.

_It isn’t love, Eames._

Out of the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees Yusuf pull a whistling face of surprise.

“Don’t say that,” Arthur says for lack of a response.

“You’re in love with him, too.”

Arthur has no response this time, because _that_ was never in question. Arthur knows he loves Eames, he’s known it all along.

It’s just impossible to trust that the heart Eames offered him up was ever really available for him to take.

It wasn’t a lack of desire that kept him from accepting what Eames tried so hard to give him. It was, rather, a lack of faith.

And Arthur, he doesn’t want this to be proof, doesn’t want this to be how he finally realises how goddamn stupid he was to throw Eames’ words back in his face so many times, not now, when he might never get a chance to just say _yes,_ this time, to just say, _I love you too._

“I’m going back under,” he says, shaking as he pushes himself to his feet. “I’m going to find him. I can’t - I can’t leave him down there.”

He barely registers Olivier’s hands easing him down onto the side of the bed. Just feels the press of his head as close as he dares to Eames', lies beside him just to feel what meagre warmth remains.

“We’ll be right here,” Olivier says, and Yusuf is fiddling with the PASIV even as she takes a seat at the foot of the bed, legs propped up between Arthur and Eames’.

“Olivier, I need to tell you something,” Arthur whispers, so close to Eames’ stubbled face, but it’s too late.

They drop together, like rain from the branches, into the muddy pools below.

.

.

 _Arthur, this is Eames, my Forger,_ Olivier said the first time, like they were strangers.

Because she didn’t know, and Arthur, he waited those weeks out sleepless, waited to wake up to her gun in his face or her knife at his throat, but it never happened.

Eames never told her, and Arthur, he pretended it was respect for Eames’ secrets that he didn’t, either.

.

.

Arthur, he's not a coward. 

Still, he knows he isn't  _brave,_ either.

.

.

The forest that looms in the long shadows of the house is wretched, pine bristle thick.

Arthur runs through it, Olivier at his heels.

They are chased like cattle ahead of wolves, like cars ahead of dogs.

She breaks off with a hiss and a bullet whistles past, that cracking bang. The heat of the sun is strong even through the leafy overhead and stinging branches slit his skin with cuts that smell of tree sap.

Her fox red hair darts and disappears and footsteps follow. He’s not dressed up military anymore, he’s wearing an Oxford University sweater. Pale jeans and sneakers that rub his heels. He doesn’t know what in his head prompted the change but he doesn’t have time to analyse it.

He runs and he runs and then the cracking bang of that gun, loud, smashes through his head and his body collapses bedraggled against a tree, where it remains.

.

.

(And he doesn’t know it, but he’s found there, incertitude and intrigue. A shape of Arthur that is not Arthur, looks down at him without recognition. There’s a ringing phone call and hot stripe tears and Olivier watches, paralysed with fear, a knife in her back, just out of sight.)

.

.

In the house, Arthur leaves a note on the cardboard lid of a box.

 _WAIT HERE_ he writes in fact purple marker, tries to imitate Eames’ handwriting only to realise several things, but chiefly, he has no idea what Eames’ handwriting is because he changes it every week.

He leaves the box, full of glass and memories, in the kitchen of that lonesome house.

He peeks through every doorway and there, in the living room, bloodstains he doesn’t recognise.

On the wall, smeared charcoal and blood, is a word.

 _DIEF_ it reads, just like the brand stamped across Eames’ back.

He’s here, in this house. He hasn’t forgotten, has only buried it.

This house, it isn’t a box of memories. It is layers and layers of all that makes Eames real, and Arthur has been so stupid, he stares out of a window at the shape of himself playing with a beautiful border collie dog.

“Ben!” his voice that isn't his own shouts, strangled with adoration and it’s no coincidence, there’s no such thing, not here, not now.

A hand reaches out from behind to smother him, and he fights until he dies.

.

.

 _There’s a dog called Ben,_ he tells Olivier as they sit on the grassy embankment and she looks at him in confusion and says, _So?_

And Arthur says, _That’s my real name._

.

.

Then the dog dies and that misshapen Eames-Arthur is devastated and Arthur thinks, _this can’t go on._

But every time he reaches out a hand towards him, one clamps on his throat or his mouth. Fingernails in his mouth and in his eyes, clawing him apart.

He puts on a CD player and plays Edith Piaf and it works for half a second at a time, increments of memories returning. He sees it in the walls of this house that no Jack built.

.

.

He doesn’t know how Eames found out his grandfather ran a vineyard, or if it was the luckiest of all guesses.

Or maybe it’s something they share. Maybe coincidences do exist.

.

.

They wake up, first level horror, and Olivier says, with real tears in her eyes,

“I know you and Eames, I know you’ve always had this _thing._ And I did hope that one day you’d find the time to stop being stupid, but it’s over. You can’t do anymore. You can’t do this again. It’s going to kill you.”

.

.

“Are you coming with me or what?” he asks obtusely.

“Yes,” she says, defeated. “And I’ll put some lilies on your fucking grave.”

.

.

 _I would say seven,_ Yusuf said.

 _What about twelve?_ Arthur should have asked.

.

.

From outside, he watches a shape that looks almost like Eames walk through the gate to the inside. There’s a shadow following him. A Peter Pan shape of childishness, of horror.

The limping figure of a battered Bryony Wright, leaving trails of blood in the dusty grass.

.

.

It ends, ends badly, and brilliantly. It ends like this.

.

.

On the embankment, creeping into the descending night for the last time, Arthur turns to Olivier and says,

“There’s something you need to know.”

“What is it?” she asks.

They’ve killed the dog and they’ve killed Bryony Wright and they’ve killed the ferocious woman in the polkadot sundress and they’ve tried to set the house on fire but it refuses to burn.

It’s their last chance, Arthur can feel it like a kiss of curses.

There’s a bruise on her cheek and a split in her lip.

“You didn’t introduce Eames and I to each other. We met, before.”

Her eyes, greener than the grass beneath their hands. Her brow furrowed and her mouth open.

If she really is married, he hopes whoever it is loves her deeply, the way she deserves.

“How?” she asks, the way a mother asks without wanting to know, without wanting to hear the truth as her world is torn out from her in a military’s formal apology. A flag in her hands that is useless to her suffering.

Above them, the sky darkens.

It’s _her,_ he knows. This Limbo is Eames’, and it’s Arthur’s, but it’s Olivier’s now, too, and he is grateful, disgustingly grateful, that her torment will distract them long enough for him to reach Eames, finally.

The sun is mottled, like the moon. Whitening light to a glaze of iridescent despair.

Arthur looks at Olivier and says, with a defiance he doesn’t deserve, a confidence he has never known, words he thought he’d never say aloud.

“I was in Nairobi.”

Olivier recoils like she’s been punched in the sternum.

She flinches back and moves her mouth silently and shakes her head, refuses to believe him and he can’t blame her.

“I was the…” he tries and fails. He’s still looking her in the eye, _fuck_ knows how. Maybe because he knows when he looks away, he might never be able to look her in the eye again. “I pulled him out of the fire. I didn’t - I thought - I was.”

He stops, gathers his thoughts. The sky casts shadows that belong to Jupiter’s moons, noxious and furious.

In the interim, Olivier says, ghost clammy,

“You left him in the desert.”

“I thought he was dead!” Arthur says, Arthur cries, Arthur insists like a spell over everything.

There are constellations here, that can be seen from Kenya.

“He wasn’t - and I - he - he was dead and I was s-scared and I left him there. I left him there. I didn't know. You’ve got to believe me.”

It’s a foolish ask, really, because it's frightening how easily she _is_ believing this. She’s looking at him with such disappointment, such betrayal. The way Eames looked at him when he left LAX after Cobb cleared customs, without even a token acknowledgement.

“And - and when I walked into that warehouse and he was there, I, it was all I could do not to start fucking crying. The way he looked at me.”

He doesn’t need to voice that one. Olivier knows how Eames looked at Arthur, the way she’s looking at him now. That new-light, rose-tint-removal. That clearing of the air to make room for the tear gas.

“You were military,” she whispers harshly, wetly. He nods, his chest cracking, his lungs shrinking. “So that means…”

“Yes, _Sophie,”_ he says with defensive fear, and her eyes widen as that name leaves his lips, like it’s the final proof she needs. “I know exactly who you are. Who Eames is. I know what you guys did.”

Something creases her expression, a disbelieving wonder that hardens to marble in her bloodless face.

“Eames told you?” she asks.

“We’ve not exactly talked about it,” he spits. “It’s a rather sore subject.”

She understands, now, exactly why he was never supposed to go inside Eames’ head.

Olivier looks at the house, her profile trembling, moonlit.

Tears sparkle bright as the stars on her cheeks.

“I have to go,” she says, and at first he thinks she means to the house, but then there’s a gun in her hand and he flinches, forwards and backwards, flailing.

“Olivier, no, please, I’m so close -”

“Don’t you dare contact me again,” she says, barrel nestled in the soft skin beneath her chin.

“Just _wait-”_ he cries desperately, terribly. “He’s _right there.”_

“Then you’d better fucking run, you piece of shit,” she says, cold as the look she gave Calvin Ross in that bistro back room only a few days ago, all those millenia of suffering ago.

Arthur, he’s a soldier in his heart and in his mind. He knows orders the way he knows day from night and he knows she will give him less than a minute before she pulls that trigger and destroys his safety net.

“I’m sorry,” he says like it will do any good.

“Bring him back,” she says, chin dimpled with wobbly tears. A sob ripples out of her at the last word, a need she can’t control. She doesn’t want to ask it of him, he knows, hates herself maybe as much as she hates him. She shakes her head and says, incredulous, “I can’t believe he still loves you.”

Arthur has nothing to say to that, because he’s never believed it either, not until now, until _this._

 _“Go!”_ she shouts like a car crash, like the wreckage of her failing pride laid bare.

Arthur scrambles down the grassy bank and towards the house.

The night is descending and the moon is brightening and the wind in his lungs, shards of glass. He can hear that rumble, a broken boiler and the clatter-bounce of a die.

He runs, cramp in his calves and fists his totem and bursts through the heavy front door just as the crack of a gun ricochets through the dazzling air.

Everything screams, the porch rips apart hurricane loud and the door shuts behind him and the walls shake and upstairs, there’s the scream of a child as she dies more terribly than any living thing that came before her.

The windows rattle with the force of Olivier’s rage and Arthur’s guilt and there in the hallway, a soft eared border collie stares at him.

Arthur laughs weakly, half expects the dog to maul him to death in the muted gloom.

But the dog just patters forwards, claws tickling the wooden floor, until he can nose-nudge the back of Arthur’s hand.

Arthur smoothes his fur and kisses his head and apologises gently.

“I need to bring him back,” he tries to explain, and the dog’s sad eyes just look up at him, big and trusting.

He thinks, perhaps, the world has reduced to this, this house and this dog and this hallway. These stairs that are gleaming with polish and broken with age.

He walks up them, step by step, creaking and groaning. Up flight and flight until he reaches the top. In the room with the trapeze, that bouncing rattling.

A girl with blonde hair and grey eyes, tied to a chair, staring morosely at him, red on her lips.

“You had no right,” she says without ambiguity.

“I know,” Arthur replies.

The girl tugs at her bonds with futile pulls, licks a drop of blood from her lower lip and sniffs painfully.

Arthur approaches her, and finds without surprise he has the key in his pocket.

He unties her and she rubs her raw wrists, makes no move to get up.

“He’s in there,” she says, aggrieved and amazed, nods her heads to the door across the hall.

“I know,” Arthur replies again, and walks away unscathed.

.

.

When he wakes up,  _if_ he wakes up, Olivier will be gone, he realises.

He wonders if Eames will go after her.

.

.

He stands outside the door, looks down to check himself. Shirt and sweater and slacks, as _Arthur_ as he possibly can be.

Just like last time, he can sense him behind the door. He’s ready this time. He knows he’s going to open the door and Eames is going to see him, finally. Going to know it’s him, know it’s _real._

If he doesn’t, well. That’s not going to happen.

Arthur reaches for the doorhandle, turns and pushes just like before.

The shape of otherness. Salt and pepper hair, a face with his eyes and someone else’s nose and a mouth that belongs to nobody.

Without moving, Arthur opens his mouth and says,

“Eames, it’s Arthur. Eames, I’ve come to take you home.”

Far below them both, there’s the rumble of a loud, broken boiler. Arthur freezes for a moment, but it quietens again. That face that is nobody’s, it creases and crumples.

There’s a crystal moment, smashed glass and sunshine.

They are starlit, here. Indigo shadows like a photo smudged beyond repair.

“How did you get here?” Eames asks in a voice that isn’t his own. There’s a wash of Pacific coast to it that doesn’t make sense.

Arthur tries to smile but he thinks maybe it doesn’t work, thinks he might have forgotten how.

“It took a long time,” he says truthfully, even though it isn’t really an answer to the actual question.

“But you-”

“I know,” Arthur says, desperately, because Eames can’t say it, can’t break the spell, just in case it spoils everything, just in case it breaks the miracle of their minds finally at peace, resting against one another like parallel worlds.

Eames hasn’t looked this breakable since the day Arthur left him lifeless in the desert.

“You’ve been waiting for a long time,” he says, and he doesn’t just mean here in Limbo.

He hopes Eames realises that.

In an act of sudden inspiration, as if perhaps to prove how much he means it, Arthur throws his totem between them and they stare down at it together for the first time.

It lands on eight, just like Arthur knew it would.

A choking sound escapes Eames, then. A laughter half Arthur’s, half his own. He buries his jigsaw puzzle face into his hands and Arthur moves towards him, like gravity and desire.

Arthur reaches up to push his fingers through Eames’ stupidly dark hair, kisses those weather rough knuckles and the small patch of his forehead not covered by his hands. His runs his fingers over his scalp and brushes away the dark hair, unwanted, until it is replaced with gold and brown.

“That’s better,” he says without meaning to.

Eames, surprised, peeks through his hands, brushes tears from his cheeks, embarrassed.

Before he can hide again, Arthur gives in to his screaming urge to do _something._

He takes Eames’ wonderfully whole face in his hands, those cheekbones that fit inside his palms so well, and kisses his speechless, open lips.

As the surprise claims them both, the sound of rumbling beneath their feet erupts again. Arthur grips him tighter just as Eames lets out a sad, sorry cry that catches in Arthur’s mouth, their teeth clacking together.

“She was so afraid,” Eames cries out desperately in a confession too terrible to bear and Arthur feels the panic seize him.

There’s something  _un-Eames_ about him, something in his eyes or his jaw, something changing. He shakes his head and kisses him, kisses him into submission and clings to him.

He can’t lose him now, won’t lose him now. He’s _here,_ he’s _Eames,_ he's  _Eames, now._

“No, Eames, no,” he says, he commands, he refuses. “Don’t do this.”

Eames is shivering violently in Arthur’s grip. He feels small, feels afraid, and Arthur does, too.

“Come back,” he murmurs between tiny pecking kisses, like waking up from a nightmare, like falling down a well. “Come back,” he says again and again and he knows it’s not fair and apparently so does Eames, because he snarls,

“You left,” full of weak betrayal that growls in his throat.

And Arthur, he doesn’t know what else to say except,

“I came back.”

Has to hope that that's enough, that he came back, that he will always come back.

Eames holds onto him, storm port strong. His eyes are grey and violet and blue, his mouth his pink and his cheeks are pale.

He stares back at Arthur with all that adoration that used to make Arthur’s insides curl with insecurity, only now, now he thinks maybe it’s real, he knows it is.

 _It isn’t love,_ he said to Eames and he couldn’t have been more wrong.

“You love me,” he says, like a secret he’s always known, has squashed out of reach.

Eames smiles, not a big smile, not by any means, but a real one.

“Yes, I do,” he says, and there’s relief there, like he knows Arthur finally believes him.

“You forgot everything except me,” Arthur says in an absolutely astonishing display of narcissism that makes him blush at his own ego and makes Eames laugh a little, and tuck his nose into Arthur’s cheek with a small, butter soft kiss.

Then he says, quite simply,

“You love me.”

Like that’s all there is to it, like that’s the beginning and end of all this reign of terror, and maybe, Arthur thinks with a kind of naivety he’s never really deserved before, maybe that’s really all there is.

He thinks, maybe, he hears that sad eyed border collie downstairs, still standing guard.

“Come back with me?” Arthur whispers into the night of Eames’ awakening.

Eames looks at him with clear eyes, traces the ridge of his nose and kisses his mouth one more time.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he says with a tiny frown and a tinier grin.

Arthur kisses him just once more, just in case, just because.

The gun is heavy in his hands and Eames’ eyes are closed and he thinks, if this doesn’t work, it won’t matter, because he’ll be dead, they’ll both be gone.

He pulls the trigger, once, twice, and they drop together like marionettes, their strings that sing like steel wires.

.

.

Arthur wakes up.

.

.

So does Eames.

.

.


End file.
